Shadow
13-04-2010, 19:00
Twitter announced in the US that it is introducing advertising by allowing companies to pay to have their messages show up first in searches on its site.
The debut of "Promoted Tweets" comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.
The ads will apparently not bring in much money during the experimental phase of Twitter's commercial push.
Virgin America, one of the advertisers which Twitter invited to test the concept, is not paying for its first burst of promotional messages, according to Porter Gail, the airline's vice president of marketing.
"I would expect that it would turn into a paid model in the future," she said.
Twitter said Best Buy, Sony Pictures and Starbucks were among the other advertisers using Promoted Tweets.
Twitter has grown quickly in popularity since it started in 2006, with celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher "tweeting" messages of 140 characters or fewer alongside everyday users.
About 22 million people in the US used Twitter.com last month, up from 524,000 visitors two years ago, according to comScore Inc.
But the site has been slow to capitalise financially on that success.
Source: The Press Association
The debut of "Promoted Tweets" comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.
The ads will apparently not bring in much money during the experimental phase of Twitter's commercial push.
Virgin America, one of the advertisers which Twitter invited to test the concept, is not paying for its first burst of promotional messages, according to Porter Gail, the airline's vice president of marketing.
"I would expect that it would turn into a paid model in the future," she said.
Twitter said Best Buy, Sony Pictures and Starbucks were among the other advertisers using Promoted Tweets.
Twitter has grown quickly in popularity since it started in 2006, with celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher "tweeting" messages of 140 characters or fewer alongside everyday users.
About 22 million people in the US used Twitter.com last month, up from 524,000 visitors two years ago, according to comScore Inc.
But the site has been slow to capitalise financially on that success.
Source: The Press Association