Silicon Alley Insider ran a story Monday announcing, "Twitter Sells an Ad!":
Twitter is finally tapping into a revenue trickle: It will offer promotional space on Twitter.com to ExecTweets, a Web site that aggregates tweets from business executives, organized by ad network Federated Media. Microsoft is sponsoring ExecTweets, and FM will share some of that revenue with Twitter via a new partnership.
The three-year-old company, which has 27 employees, is estimated to be worth anywhere from $60 to $150 million. Some even say it could be worth $1 billion in a year with a burn rate estimated at $7.5 million a year.
Response so far has been rather tepid, as many people have speculated Twitter would have to monetize the service somehow -- either through sponsored brand accounts or ads in news feeds.
Peter Kafka, on The Wall Street Journal's "All Things Digital" blog, sums up responses to the change and addresses Twitter's real challenge: users who access Twitter through anything but the Web site don't see the ads. Kafka writes:
As advertising goes, this is pretty innocuous. Hard to imagine even Twitter's most anti-advertising adherents having a big problem with this one. But it's also hard to imagine that many people will see the ads at all since the majority of Twitter use happens off the site, on mobile apps like Twitterific for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and desktop clients like Tweetdeck.
And it's hard to imagine that many folks will want to use ExecTweet, period: The whole joy of Twitter is seeking out and finding specific people you find interesting -- not just a mass of people whose common thread is that they're 'executives.'
