Twitter Launches "Promoted Tweets" to Generate Ad Revenue

Twitter has answered the question about how the Company is going to earn money. Twitter is selling keywords to advertisers to produce "promoted tweets" (read ads). Promoted tweets will launch today to about 2 percent to 10 percent of Twitter users. Initially, promoted tweets will appear only on searches conducted on Twitter's website but this appears to be just the first phase of Twitter’s revenue plan. From Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's blog post:

Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.

Sounds like tweet spam to me if promoted tweets will be appearing in a user’s Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser. Read more about it: Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads (New York Times), Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets (TechCruch) and Twitter Has a Business Model: 'Promoted Tweets' (Ad Age). [JH]