Media Post is reporting that Twitter will unveil its advertising in the near future. The revelation was made by Anamitry Banerji (head of product management and monetization at Twitter) in a panel discussion with Seth Goldstein (chief executive officer and co-founder of socialmedia.com).
Goldstein asked Banerji, you will “likely in the next month or so offer Twitter owned and operated ads, perhaps?” to which Banerji replied, “that’s right.”
Banerji, who had previously been at Overture, was also asked about the experiences learned at Overture in developing first search ads, and how that experience is being put to use at Twitter. According to Media Post:
Goldstein, who also co-chairs the IAB social media committee, coaxed Banerji to share details on the “imminent” Twitter ad platform by asking questions such as “you were at Overture before, so what did you learn from that experience” when it comes to “developing the first search ads you’re putting into Twitter?”
“Innovate very, very quickly, before someone innovates on top of you,” Banerji said. “And be very, very focused on execution. Just be dedicated to your own roadmap and don’t worry so much about what’s happening around you.”
Banerji also made it clear that Twitter has no intentions of controlling the advertising landscape on the Twitter platform, which means that other competing ad systems would continue to flourish even after the launch of Twitter’s own advertising platform.
“We don’t think of ourselves as a Web site — essentially it’s a platform,” Banerji said. “We don’t really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us — and that’s if bad ads get identified in Twitter — it’s a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior.”
Recent reports show that for the month of Dec. 2009, Twitter experienced an increase of 579% in unique visitors from the same time last year – growing to 18.1 million unique visitors from 2.7 million uniques in Dec, 2008. Twitter’s own internal stats show that the social network now sends out 50 million tweets a day, which averages down to 600 tweets per second.
With such growth stats, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Twitter concentrating on monetization.
