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Twitter Bans Third-Party In-Stream Ads

by Terrence O'Brien on May 25, 2010 at 09:10 AM

twitter bans third party adsTwitter has effectively killed an entire market for Twitter ads today by announcing that all in-stream third party advertising is being banned with the launch of its own Promoted Tweets platform. Services that update users' Twitter status with advertisements, such as ad.ly, PayPerTweet and the newly launched TweetUp, are hereby banished. As the company put it in an update on the official Twitter blog, "build your service around the timeline, not in the timeline."

The goal, Twitter says, is to preserve the "long-term health and value" of the social network. "Third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created," the blog reports. Valid points, but when an entire ecosystem has been developed around the idea of in-stream advertising, squashing the market without much warning is going to irritate many, like TweetUp, which launched only hours before the announcement, and its investors are surely quite peeved.

The major recurring theme through the lengthy announcement (for a service based on concise 140-character updates, they sure are a wordy bunch) is avoiding sacrificing long-term value for short-term monetization. Twitter is probably correct in assuming that many of these third party advertising networks have little interest in preserving Twitter for innovation and long term growth. Instead, most are simply trying to make a buck before the service falls out of favor. In the long run, Twitter has probably made the right move, but for today, the Mad Men aren't happy. [From: Twitter, via: TheNextWeb]

Tags: ad.ly, adly, ads, advertising, PayPerTweet, Promoted Tweets, PromotedTweets, socialnetworking, top, tweetup, twitter, twitter ads, TwitterAds

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