Twitter To Prohibit Any Third Party To Advertise In-Stream
Twitterjust put up a blog post talking up its platform approach and long-term strategy. Surprisingly, the company has made some decisions that are sure to irk a couple of third-party developers and startups.
Here’s the big news: aside from Promoted Tweets, Twitter said it will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.
That’s not so good news for TweetUp (and other Twitter-focused advertising startups like Ad.ly and Twad.ly). Particularly not the former, which just launched its live beta at TechCrunch Disrupt half an hour ago.
Here are the reasons Twitter says it decided not to allow third-parties to advertise in the stream:
First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.
Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.
It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.
Twitter adds that when its new Annotations feature launches, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available.
The company does recognize that for a few companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which some have invested resources.
It will be interesting to see how those companies will respond to the news. TweetUp, for one, says they never planned to advertise in-stream, so this won’t affect them as much as you would think at first.
Nevertheless, it shows that Twitter’s decisions on the way it moves forward with its platform and how to monetize it most efficiently should keep startups that base their entire business model on the Twitter platform on guard.
