After Building an Audience, Twitter Turns to Ads
Twitter at last looks serious about making money. — In the last two weeks, the company has introduced several advertising plans, courted Madison Avenue at Advertising Week, the annual industry conference, and promoted Dick Costolo …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's business model had been an open question since early scrutiny of its commercial prospects, followed by a brief history of monetization proposals and April's first public advertising plans. The October push turns that discussion into an organized sales effort.
The company is pairing several ad products and an Advertising Week outreach effort with Dick Costolo's elevation to chief executive, concentrating responsibility for converting audience attention into revenue.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies gain a defined set of Twitter advertising options to assess after months in which monetization plans were still being formulated.
- Dick Costolo takes responsibility for matching Twitter's ad-sales push with the company leadership role.
Second-order effects
- Twitter moves into direct competition for Madison Avenue budgets, making its ability to package audience attention for agencies a near-term commercial test.
- The advertising plans unveiled in April become a broader go-to-market effort rather than a standalone product announcement.
Third-order effects
- If audience-first web services follow Twitter's path, scale will increasingly be treated as the prerequisite for selling advertising rather than the business model itself.
- The shift puts greater strategic weight on executive teams that can translate consumer reach into products agencies recognize and buy.
The trend: Twitter is part of a broader shift in which large consumer web audiences are being turned into formal advertising businesses through product packaging and agency outreach.