Twitter to Start Selling Ads

Twitter announced Tuesday that it will start showing sponsored tweets on some search pages, taking a cautious first step into a traditional advertising business model that could provide a steady source of revenue for the 4-year-old startup which doesn't make any serious money yet, but is reckoned to be worth a billion dollars.

The so-called Promoted Tweets will put tweets from paying customers at the top of some Twitter search pages, clearly marked as ads, the company said in a blog post. Users would otherwise see these tweets only if they followed the related accounts, found them by chance in a search, or saw them randomly in the Twitter timeline.

Including the advertisement, tweets with search results -- what might be called the Google model -- is less intrusive than putting them, say, on “your" Twitter page when you log onto the site. Promoted Tweets will initially appear on only a small proportion of search pages.

And since they retain the character and length of a tweet -- 140 characters, no inline images -- they have the advantage of not seeming jarringly out of place. The content would be exactly what a Twitter user might expect from a company promoting its message on the service, though this will make ignoring that company and its message more difficult.