14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has managed to create quite a bit of hype with its long awaited ad platform. There haven't been any actual details on how the company plans to implement ads on the site but, if you take Twitter's word on it, they will be "fascinating," "non-traditional" and "really cool.” But if the latest leaked details are to be believed, most people wound't use any of the above words to describe them. Then again, most people don't run Twitter.
So what are these mysterious, innovative ads we keep hearing about? Get ready for this, they're search ads. That is to say, ads that show when doing a search on the site. If the concept seems vaguely familiar it's perhaps this little-known startup, Google, has been doing for close to a decade now, with a fair amount of success, in the range of a few tens of billions of dollars each year.
But don't dismiss them out of hand, let's see what they're all about. People 'close to the matter' are telling All Things Digital's Peter Kafka that the ads, for now at least, will only show up in searches. They'll also follow Twitter's model so they'll be limited to 140 characters. The ads will also tap into Twitter's, arguably, biggest asset its API so third-party developers will be able to integrate them in their ads and services and split the revenue with Twitter. Finally, for starters, Twitter will work directly with advertisers and agencies, but as the platform ramps up, it will introduce a self-serve model as well.
Of course, the details are still being worked out so things may change, perhaps dramatically, by the time the ad platform launches, supposedly some time in the first half of the year. But if this is the best that Twitter could come up with, it all feels more than a bit underwhelming. That is not to say that it won't work, it's just that for one of the hottest new-comers of the moment but one behind the long shadow cast by Facebook, something just 'good enough' won't cut it.