Twitter Strikes Off Third Party In-Stream Ads From its Platform

by venus on May 25th, 2010

Twitter has announced that the third party advertising networks and developers will no longer be able to insert ads into a user’s stream. According to the company, aside from Promoted Tweets, Twitter will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

The move that comes as great distress once again for the developers community as well third-party advertising networks like Ad.ly and new Idealab startup called Tweetup who have created their businesses around in-stream ads. According to Twitter’s official blog post , the decision revolves around two key factors that include:

First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform.

Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience.

Twitter says that it has also updated its API Terms of Service for the same.

With Twitter’s own promoted tweets round the corner, the company isobviously cutting of the competition that these in-stream ads may have posed. Also another major reason that has been brought to light is that Twitter no longer wants to bear the cost of supporting these advertising networks that don’t bring the company any direct value and revenue.

“It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.”

Twitter is also taking care about how its new decision would be taken by the developer community as it tries to show its concern with the following note:

“ We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.”

Image credits: bluefountainmedia, littlebirdiecommunications

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