The day has come: Twitter introduces paid tweets

SAN FRANCISCO -- Twitter announced Tuesday that it is introducing advertising by allowing companies to pay to have their messages show up first in searches on its site.

The debut of "Promoted Tweets" comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.

The ads apparently won't bring in much money during the experimental phase of Twitter's commercial push. Virgin America, one of the advertisers that Twitter invited to test the concept, isn't paying for its first burst of promotional messages, according to Porter Gail, the airline's vice president of marketing.

"I would expect that it would turn into a paid model in the future," Gail told The Associated Press.

Twitter declined to comment when asked whether it's charging the test group of advertisers. Besides Virgin America, Twitter identified Best Buy Co., Sony Pictures and Starbucks Corp. among the other companies using Promoted Tweets.

The ads will be rolled out gradually, with fewer than 10 percent of Twitter's users likely to see them Tuesday. The company says the ads should be appearing in all relevant searches within the next few days.

Twitter has grown quickly in popularity since it started in 2006, with celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher "tweeting" messages of 140 characters or less alongside everyday users. About 69 million people worldwide used Twitter.com last month, up from roughly 4 million at the end of 2008, according to comScore Inc.

The site has been slow to capitalize on that success -- even though the investors who have backed the site have valued it at $1 billion.

Twitter has been making an undisclosed amount of money by providing Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. with access to messages for their search engines. Many people expected Twitter would eventually introduce advertising.

In a blog post Tuesday, company co-founder Biz Stone said the company took its time "because we wanted to optimize for value before profit."

These tweets are to be "called out" as ads on top of search results on Twitter, much as sponsors can pay for listings atop rankings on search engines such as Google, Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo. That means Twitter users would see the new ads when they search broadly for topics being tweeted about.

However, many users connect with the service not through such searches or even visits to the site. Rather, scores of outside programmers have written mobile and desktop software that can access the feeds of Twitter messages that users get from people they are "following" on the site.

Twitter said it might take the Promoted Tweets service further and make them also show up on those feeds.

Stone said Promoted Tweets will need to resonate with users. If a Promoted Tweet isn't replied to or forwarded by other users, it will disappear.

<p class="factboxheadblack">Questions and answers about new ads on Twitter</p>

<p class="News">Twitter is now letting advertisers pay to have their tweets appear in search results on the site. Here are some questions and answers about what the development means:</p>

<p class="NewsQ1">Q: When will I see these new advertisements?</p>

<p class="News">A: You might not see them for a few days. Twitter was aiming the ads at less than 10 percent of its audience on Tuesday. The ads should begin appearing in all relevant searches within the next week.</p>

<p class="NewsQ">Q: Will I now be bombarded with ads on Twitter?</p>

<p class="News">A: Twitter says it's going for something far more subtle than bombardment. For now, at least, you would have to search Twitter for all tweets on a given subject, such as "Starbucks." A tweet that Starbucks paid to have come up first might appear atop the list of search results. This tweet would follow Twitter's usual guidelines, including the 140-character limit.</p>

<p class="NewsQ">Q: I never search for topics on Twitter. I just tweet my thoughts and read my friends' tweets. Would I see these ads?</p>

<p class="News">A: You would see the paid tweet from Starbucks if you "followed" Starbucks, which means you had signed up to get all of its updates. Otherwise, at least for now, you'd probably see one of these new "promoted tweets" only if one of the people in your network forwards it, or "retweets" it. At some point, Twitter says, it might incorporate promoted tweets into your personal "timeline" of messages, if they are presumed to be relevant to you.</p>

<p class="NewsQ">Q: Does this mean Twitter is more likely to stick around?</p>

<p class="News">A: Until now Twitter had only one main revenue stream. It got an undisclosed amount of money from Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in exchange for the rights to have tweets appear quickly in the results generated by those companies' Internet search engines. It's not clear how much money the new ad program can bring in, but advertising is generally considered to be the main way that Twitter's founders can build a profitable company. It still mainly subsists on $155 million it has raised from venture capitalists.</p>