Twitter To Make Money From Contextual Ads

Twitter now has a revenue model. Aside from the real-time search deals that Twitter has with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), the company will soon start to integrate contextual ads within their stream. The contextual ads are part of a program called Promoted Tweets. Ads will appear in streams where they are expected to be relevant. Some of the companies on board include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo.

“The idea behind Promoted Tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,” stated Twitter COO Dick Costolo. Twitter received 22.3 million unique visitors this past March. In March of the year before, the company hit 524,000 uniques. Twitter will measure the ads placed in the stream using the number of people that saw the post, number of people that replied to the post, and the number of people that clicked the links. [NYT]

Related posts:

1. Twitter Plans To Make Money In 2010 Through Non-Traditional Ads
2. Twitter Strikes SMS Deal With Airtel
3. Twitter Getting Close To Hitting 10 Billion Tweets
4. Sparkfun Twitter Free Day Promotion Overloads Server, Knocks Out Service
5. Microsoft Launches Twitter Beta Search On Bing and It Has Retweets Built In