We have been on the dawn of social media monetization for a long time now. I’m sure saying “social media” and “monetization” together like that will piss-off a lot of people. But hey, something’s gotta pay the bills. I also have some great data through BSA’s sponsored tweets ad type that says people aren’t really that angry. It’s amazing to see how much engagement sponsored tweets actually get (with our “* ad” disclosure, of course). Just a recent as yesterday a sponsored tweet generated ~100 retweets. Surprising, huh – people didn’t revolt, they not only clicked on, but retweeted a sponsored ad.
Back to the story. It looks like we’re getting very close to seeing, in self-serve mode, what it is that Twitter has been working on the past year+ with the Promoted Tweets interface.
The platform allows advertisers to purchase products like Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts on a cost-per-engagement or cost-per-follower basis. Prices for ads on Twitter are said to range from $2.50 to $4 for every follower associated with a Promoted Account, and $0.75 to $2.50 for every engagement (being a click, favorite, retweet or @reply) associated with a Promoted Tweet.
via MediaBistro
What’s interesting about this is how incredibly different this will be from AdSense. When most folks think of text ads they immediately think of AdSense (including myself), and I’m pretty sure that many will also compare ads on Twitter to AdSense. The biggest challenge for Twitter in monetizing Twitter is that they don’t control the content and it will be harder to wrap a display experience around content that you con’t control. You could argue that the same is true for Google Search – not so fast – Google definitely controls the content that shows up in search. Their entire business revolves around continuously improving that content. For Twitter, it’s nothing like that. They have zero control over the content. And if/when they do try to control the content, they get the 1st amendment folks all excited. While they do control the Twitter search results, I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of Twitter consumption doesn’t happen on a search results page.
Todd founded BuySellAds and lives in Boston with his wife and chocolate lab Rusty. He's a front-end engineer by trade and believes in a less obtrusive future in online advertising. For more, follow him
Absolutely , Twitter does actually lacks in controlling of content across the micro-blogging platform , Google has put very strict controls over their monetizing service that is adsense and that’s why it is still highly rated amongst most publishers and advertisers . Twitter should be thinking about the content controlling .
Hi Todd.
Interesting article & (IMO) an accurate summary of the situation.
Google Adsense is in a whole other world to Twitter when it comes to monetizing content, much to Twitter’s financial sadness :-). Shame really, because I for one would LOVE more great alternatives to AdWords/Adsense. Google has one of the best integrated online ad systems out there (no disrespect to BSA intended), and because of this, they charge premium prices for advertising.
Quality, cost-effective alternatives would be a great thing to have, even if it was just to keep Google from getting too self-important & elitist.
Anyway, now that I have found BSA, I will look more closely at your offerings. As I said above, quality alternatives are definitely a good thing.