Twitter starts serving ads stateside

The Standard — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:11:27 -0700

Judgment on August 16, 2008: This prediction did not occur in the allotted timeframe. The community was right. Judged at 0%. -- The Industry Standard

With the most recent news of Twitter raising a $15-20 million C round of venture financing, the rollout of the long talked-about Twitter ad/monetization strategy is likely close at hand. Sure, even companies with HUGE valuations like Slide and Facebook are still trying to figure out how to make money off of their massive number of users, but last week's Twitter launch in Japan tells us that if the advertising experiment plays well abroad, it won't be long before we see a similar move here in the States. A C round is traditionally designed to help scale a business to the point of profitability, so the new investors, whomever they are, won't sit around for too long before they start bouncing around the room like Cuba Gooding, Jr.

The only real question is: would Twitter have the cajones to start inserting ads into the homepage and/or feeds as long as the service itself continues to break down semi-regularly? An unreliable service PLUS advertising might be enough to drive users elsewhere, though Mr. Arrington would disagree. Still, we don't see the monetization strategy kicking in until late summer -- by which time, hopefully, Twitter will have solved its scaling problems once and for all.

This is a prediction that Twitter will begin implementing some sort of advertising on the homepage (each user's landing page at Twitter.com) by August 15, 2008. If other types of advertising take place in or around Twitter, these will not be grounds for favorable judgment unless they also appear on the hompage. The ads need not directly ressemble the ads in the Japanese version of Twitter, but we expect that they might.

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Twitter starts serving ads stateside