ICH MARKE DU JANE

I gotta admit – I haven’t gone through the blogosphere to read what the world is saying about this whole „TWITTER FOUND A MONETIZATION MODEL“ hoopla. I read an article over on Adrants and then another one over on Techcrunch and chatted with a couple colleagues over here about it. ( I label it as „hoopla“ because it came up more than a handful of of times in my periferal vision headline reading in the last couple days.) I also just did a quick search on the words „Twitter Ad“ over at Twitter Search. That was the extent of my research on this one. So…what you won’t find in this nice little bit of navel gazing is a summarization of the opinions out there, but just some of my top-of-mind, gut-feel thoughts. (Yeah, the weather in Munich is getting to me, can you tell?)

So my first thought about the little text ads in the form of a definition was: „oh, that’s boring.“ Textual display ads over there on the side of my profile in the form of a word definition. From a user’s perspective, it’s nice that the ads are unobtrusive and mostly blend in with the interface, but I can’t imagine that this is ultimately what advertisers will demand in the end. Then you find out that Twitter is not charging for the ads at the moment and you wonder if these promotions are some sort of trial run for the real thing. And then you start to wonder what the real thing will actually be and you realize that this whole „TWITTER FOUND A MONETIZATION MODEL“ conversation is a desperate plea from the blogosphere for something to talk about. (Yeah, and here I am adding to the damage.) Ouch.

Display ads are no longer a monetization model. Not any more. (Yeah, yeah, I know a lot of businesses would argue with me here, please, can we move on already?) And frankly, I don’t believe Twitter would be so backwards thinking. Monetization models will go more in the direction of ExecTweets’s Microsoft “branded channel” sponsorship (although this also has a feel of old school) at the very least. But I hope and think this is not where Twitter plans to ultimately score. At least for the average tweeter, the power from the service comes in context – and advertisers could be paying to be able to offer this contextualized messaging. In particular, I think about Facebook Connect-type functionality that enables profile/tweet scraping by advertisers to offer you information and services in context (think: Amazon knows you’ve been tweeting about the French restaurant you just visited and recommends the most popular french cookbook when you visit its site). Or on-the-spot product commentary (think: Nokia sees you shopping for a new mobile on its site and serves up recent tweets relevant to the phones you are checking out). There are a lot of possibilities out there that offer advertisers a chance to add real value for a user. And these are the advertisers that users will remember.

Tags: Ads, monetization, Online advertising, social marketing, twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 17:01 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.