With some big numbers – 100 million active users - Twitter have been talking about their plans for the future – including advertising. Their CEO Dick Costolo spoke last week ; this live blog of the speech is worth a read – not least to get a flavour of how ubiquitous Twitter is now.
Some of the smartest thinkers have built on this news. John Battelle has a typically well thought through piece on twitter advertising. One key quote;
( I think) Twitter will adopt a model based on two familiar features: a cost-per-engagement model (the company already uses engagement as a signal to rank an ads efficacy) and a real-time second-price bidded auction
Fred Wilson shares some thinking about the different ways people use Twitter, reminding us that lots of people just treat Twitter as a place to get news and views – essentially a broadcaster that aggregates people you’re interested in.
It is this scale – the constant broadcast – that sums up Twitters greatest asset but also its key problem. There is so much content how can users get to the good stuff? Other media have solved this problem – print lets you tear out the good articles and search back issues online. The reason Sky+ is so popular because it lets people organise their TV viewing – saving the stuff you really want to see whilst the on demand services like iPlayer and 4OD let you access stuff you missed.
But on Twitter that’s just not possible – so we get a degree of Twitter anxiety if we don’t check every few hours; worried about what we might have missed.
If Twitter can solve this problem and highlight the good stuff, they make themselves even more valuable. And advertising could prosper if it can be that well targeted. But advertising that merely adds to the noise it will be resented – and have little purpose other than perhaps motivating sign up to a premium ad free service – a la Spotify.
We were interested to read that the YouTube founders who have bought delicious from Yahoo are thinking on similar lines and see the potential to evolve the bookmarking service to focus more on social discovery.
