Twitter Footnote Ads? OK If There’s an Opt-out
by Russell Shaw
On his This is going to be BIG blog, Charlie O’Donnell notes the appearance of extra characters on some of his Twitters- and wonders aloud whether this could be some sort of precursor, test or both for ads in the footnotes of Twitter messages.
Given that some of the key execs at Twitter came from Google, I agree with O’Donnell that what we are seeing here could be a template for some sort of Google AdSense widget that would travel along with your Twitter message.
So how might this work?
It could be tied to location or even to user preferences that might be asked during Twitter registration. But probably the best way would be to tie in textual Twitter message footnotes to keywords in the actual Twitter itself.
Kind of like:
Twitter 1: What are you doing now?
Twitter 2: Kathy and I going for pizza. (Ad for a local pizzeria appears as a Twitter footnote).
An advert for a local pizza would appear as a Twitter footnote if: Twitter could sense the geographical origination of Twits, and then find an advertising-originated trigger keyword (i.e. “pizza”) for that city.
I’m OK with monetizing Twitter, but only if it is voluntary. When downloading/configuring Twitter there ought to be an opt in/opt out radio buttons for “I do/don’t want Twitter footnotes in my Twits.” These would work both for sent and received Twits.
