Headline PH: Twitter declines third-party ads on their site

Dashing the hopes of dozens of startups that had hoped to make money where Twitter had so far been unable to do so, the social mini-messaging company announced Monday that it would not allow third-party advertising on its platform henceforth.

In a blog post Tuesday, the company spent more than 1,200 words to get to the meat of the announcement: Twitter will reserve permanently the right to “inject paid tweets into a timeline” using the Twitter API. In other words: Sure, you can accept payment for a Tweet, type it up yourself and publish it using the service — but you can’t create an automated system to do this using the code Twitter provides to companies that want to build their own empires using the Twitter infrastructure.

Twitter also updated its API Terms of Service.

Why do this? It’s obvious that, as Twitter’s Promoted Tweets service gets off the ground, it is becoming crucial that the company protect its fledgling (and largely revenue-free) empire. Promoted Tweets are, for now, Twitter's great hope for making money — a concern that has to be getting more and more urgent now that Twitter employs more than 200 people.

Users have been largely unconcerned with the news either way. Although there is no significant commercial advertising on Twitter to date, major brands (and I include everyone from KFC to Ke$ha in that) already use Twitter extensively for promotional purposes in what amounts to some form of thinly veiled advertising.

The worry now is that with an “official” advertising system, Twitter will eventually become overrun with promotional content whether you sign up for it or not. Will things be better if Twitter itself is the only holder of the keys? We’ll have to wait and see when Promoted Tweets goes live.

Christopher Null
Technology writer for Yahoo! News.

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Twitter declines third-party ads on their site

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