Twitter Advertising Will Push the Boundaries of Online Advertising

There was a post in the Atlantic about Twitter’s advertising network called, No One's Noticing Twitter's New Ad Experiment, Which Is a Good Thing.

Twitter is dropping what they call “promoted tweets” into users timelines. Adam Clark Estes of the Atlantic states:

Despite months of hemming and hawing over the danger of polluting the sacred Twitter feed, the few people that have taken notice seem reasonably pleased by the hands-off approach.

A user, also cited in the article, Ellis Hamburger at Business Insider thinks the approach is awesome:

I realized that Promoted Tweets really aren't that much different from TV commercials—brief interruptions from your content.

Except they're not very annoying. …

Twitter's commercials are different and have a leg up because they will be intermixed with incredibly time-sensitive content. They're also brief, which helps. And a lot of of the time, Promoted Tweets are from celebrities who tweet their thoughts in their own voice.

I’m following Twitter’s rollout of their advertising network because its a big deal to finally see the popular micro-blogging platform finally move towards monetizing the network--even if some don’t like it. But I think the work Twitter is doing has even bigger implications, on the future of online advertising, even beyond social media.

The Internets seem to be stuck in a rut, when it comes to monetization of our online real estate. There isn’t much innovation beyond the classic online and slightly newer mobile advertising platforms dominated by Google and a handful of others. What is next?

APIs of course. As APIs also struggle to develop their monetization strategies, they tend to default to charging for their services, with some API providers like CityGrid are providing mobile and web advertising solutions alongside their APIs.

I feel what Twitter is doing is one possible model for other API owners to follow in monetizing their API platforms. Provide relevant, seamless advertising embedded into each API stream. When it comes to content APIs this is easy to envision, but with other forms of media and resources it will get much more complicated.

Twitter, was made successful by its API community, with all its web and mobile properties consuming its API, and the service itself resembles many APIs in how it works. Perhaps the work Twitter is doing can be used as a model for building out an advertising network dedicated to APIs, baking in monetization into each and every API call, before it reaches the web or mobile application layers.

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