This is complete speculation so bear with me. Very recently, Twitter changed its email alert messages from pithy text-only notices of new followers or direct messages to branded, graphical emails.
Well, Twitter has always been in a conundrum: if they monetize the sparse web interface, they’ll alienate their very touchy early-adopters and send people away in disgusted droves; however, if they place banners, contextual ads, or sponsored links into alert emails, then no harm, no foul.
I don’t know if you have every looked in your settings recently, but there is a lot of opportunity to set up your Twitter account to send you a lot of alerts and warnings, letting you know when you receive a direct message or when you score a new follower — especially if you’re someone like me, adding an additional 200-followers-per-day!
So, what do you think? Instead of Twitter shopping itself around to Google and Microsoft, maybe Twitter is shopping its inline advertising opportunity within the endless email alerts that it send me and many of you every hour of every day.
Do you think this is possible or probable? Please let me know in the comments.
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Very possible. The branded, graphical emails might be the first step in that direction … not to mention the handiwork of a certain newly-hired CD. In fact, I can see them aiming for two or three ads in the sidebar as well, a la Gmail or Facebook.
(“I, for one, welcome our new inline ad overlords.”)
That is exactly what jumped into my mind on Wednesday afternoon when I got my first HTML direct message notification. I think it’s brilliant in its simplicity.
It is also allows Twitter to avoid the complications of getting the development community on board with ads within the tweet stream. I’m sure at one point in the future there will be some sort of adsense-like revenue sharing model of Twitter apps but until then I think it is a great idea to go for the low hanging fruit.
highly possible and actually a strategic movie to add in subtle (read really subtle ads) into the inline emails. It’s smart, keeps the situation fluid.. and if they rotate the ads, they would be very wise to keep them targeted to topics and friends..
might take some coding there.. but worth a shot. (oops.. maybe I just gave away too much- ya think?)
I think there might be way too much blowback if they were to implement in-text ads — text-link ads are seriously frowned upon; however, I have been thinking about it further and I wonder if they might monetize search, since Twitter is spending more and more time “pimping” their search.twitter.com site to be amazingly the “new google” and I am sure that will probably be the place they will monetize since this is the place where there will surely be web-based eyeballs, the way Google does ads with search but not with Books or Reader, etc… does that sound right?
Twitter search results showing ads? That’s a shoo-in if there ever was one.
I would like to see twitter offer PPC ads on search.twitter.com, I’d bid on some keywords there!
Check out this post that I made even before they changed their emails, in fact it was about a week before they changed it.
http://bit.ly/TvbPn
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