Like it or not, you will start witnessing more ads in your Twitter timeline, very soon. The social networking site is planning to increase ad content in your news feed, and this change is supposed to take place in ‘early 2015’.
During a conference in San Francisco, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo talked about the company’s revenue expansion plans that includes an increase in ads in the stream.
The plan is to have one promoted tweet after every 20 user generated tweets which seems to be the ideal practice these days. This means that 5 percent of the content in any stream will be promoted content which is pretty much identical to Facebook’s ad model model. The current trend for Twitter’s ad feed is 25-30 user generated tweets for one promotional tweet.
This is obvious that Twitter’s revenue comes from the ads in our stream but this might not be the only thing that Twitter is shooting for. Twitter and Google signed a deal a few days ago that gives live tweets in Google’s search results and there was a recent announcement that the promoted content from Twitter would appear outside of Twitter, that is, wherever the tweets go.
Twitter began to roll out it’s video feature last month in an attempt to compete with Facebook so as to increase the number of daily users and increase the time they spend on their Twitter feeds. The feature started rolling out with a handful of celebrities showing it off and then it was made available for everyone.
Twitter’s fourth quarter earnings came out last week. The numbers show a growth in the revenue by 97% over a year. The increase in the user base has been slow. There was a less than 2% increase in the user base in last quarter, signalling at a growth rate, to the declining side.
