Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads

Something like this doesn't bother me at all. I enjoy using Twitter for free, and as long as the ads are targeted based on what I search for, they can be quite useful.<p>If they aren't too intrusive (and I doubt they will be), this sounds alright. It's just surprising they haven't done it sooner, which probably shows the ads won't be intrusive. If Twitter were hellbent on making tons of cash as soon as possible, they would've thrown ads all over the place quickly.

<i>"According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March, up from 524,000 a year ago"</i><p>The 524,000 figure looks fishy. Compete.com puts Twitter's April 2009 unique visitors at 19 million (versus 21 million for April 2010).

As with Google Adwords (especially PPC ads appearing when I search) this makes sense and, as long as there's a limit to how many ad-tweets appearing at one time, doesn't concern me. After all, if I tweet that I'm headed to Starbucks and get a reminder of their current promotion, that's of potential benefit to me.<p>Admittedly, the Twitter site itself is far too restrictive to provide me with useful communication data anyway, so I use TweetDeck to track conversations, topics, and mentions. With more real estate, ads would be less cluttering to me.

<i>"...Twitter’s announcement is the first significant step toward a business model."</i><p>That statement seems so odd.

"<i>Once Twitter figures out how to measure the number of people who read posts other than on Twitter.com, it will also allow third-party developers to show ads and share revenue.</i>"<p>Now this is interesting. Twitter 3rd party clients would finally have some sort of business model too!

It's not quite what they've announced, but I think there's potential in the idea that advertisers would pay to promote positive things people are already saying.<p>There's serious trust/disclosure issues to work out -- burying bad reviews and promoting good ones for payola is what makes Yelp seem a bit slimy. But if advertisers can pay to multiply any little positive thing said by someone real near you, who you already know isn't a professional shill, it could have legitimate influencing power.<p>Facebook's fan pages are also in an excellent position to try such models, with the same trust/disclosure issues.

and here we go! This will be an interesting few weeks to see how this "clicks"

Awaiting patiently the Greasemonkey script which will get rid of those ads.

Queue the apps that remove tweets in your stream not from your followers. Ad-blocking for twitter.