I haven’t been super up-to-speed on Twitter’s newly announced advertising model, so I recently read an article on Forbes (click to read full article here) that outlines the 101’s of their new model. Some may call is contextual advertising, others are calling engagement advertising. Simply put, they’re steering clear of the display ad-model and selling impressions to users, which is what Facebook and MySpace have done to-date with relative lackluster success. Users are engaged in the social media world, which does not include looking at intrusive banner ads. Twitter’s model will allow advertisers to peg their tweets to high-up rankings in twitter feeds and searches, giving sponsored tweets more time in the spotlight, hopefully generating more responses, re-tweets, and clicks by followers and the broader twitter community. I think it’s a step in the right direction considering display ads perform horribly and click-through-rates continue to plummet (indicative that consumers hate banner ads – or at least don’t respond to them). We’ll just have to see if this long-awaited paid advertising model will generate the type of revenue consistent with the hype of the announcement…
