Twadvertising
by Imran Ali
A few weeks ago, Twitter began to sneak ‘tips’ into the footers of mobile notifications, widely thought to be early experiments with advertising and possible revenue models. The tips themselves are kinda cute and unobtrusive, though it remains to be see whether this is indeed an experiment in micro-ads or just a method to drive retention and growth. Indeed, Evan Williams has stated that he sees brands paying to be ‘followed’, opening a new channel to advertising audiences.
More interestingly, IconFactory recently released a new version of Twitterific, its popular OS X Twitter desktop client. Previously free, the new edition is comes in paid, ad-free and ad-supported editions. As can be seen from the screenshot, ads are dropped into the UI as just another Twitter notification. This works surprisingly well and with ads supplied by The Deck, generally targetted well to the Twitter demographic.
With third parties such as Iconfactory now disintermediating Twitter from advertising, this raises important questions as to who owns the user experience and hence the routes to monetisation. Perhaps, if Twitter pursues its branded channels strategy, they can co-exist peacefully with the likes of Twitterific; however there’s nothing to really stop third parties entering the same space.
Is Twitter heading for a showdown with its developer community?
