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This 3rd party ad ban affects everyone who works together with Sponsored Tweets, Ad.ly, Revtwt, MyLikes, Twivert, Twittad, Magpie and many other advertising companies who connected advertisers and Twitter users to promote their product in Twitter.
Twitter announced this step for several reasons:
- Third party application companies don't have to deal directly with problems that are caused by their tweets. Twitter will get the support tickets of the other users who complain about it, may it be spammy accounts (only ads) or virus infected links and so on.
- Twitter's own Promoted Tweets won't be so effective when other third party applications want to monetize user profiles and make themselves a lot of cash with the fees they collect from the advertisers without sharing the earned $ with Twitter (Twitter itself doesn't share their income with users, too!)
- Twitter's unique user experience may get lost because of hundred similar tweets from these ad networks which annoys in the long run a lot of users and could minimize the number of active users over the time.
My Opinion:
It will be interesting to see how the above mentioned ad companies react as they have only 30 days to change the way their third party programs work.
I could imagine that several ad companies might let the users tweet the ads manually or a two click-action similar to the Retweet-Button which takes you to your Twitter account and you press then the "Tweet"-Button to tweet it into your timeline. Sponsored Tweets already announced this kind of change in their latest blog post.
The problem with this method is that the companies can't detect easily how often a tweet will be tweeted within a day (many of the companies permit only between one - six tweets/day) and advertisers might not get a their required diversified audience for their spent budget of the paid tweets.
Another problem will arouse when advertisers give you a certain time frame in which the paid tweet should be published. As most advertisers are from the United States this could get difficult if Asians or European have to tweet it manually at sleeping times ;)
Another interesting aspect might be what will happen to the earned money which the members of these 3rd party ad companies hold in their account?
Will they get paid even when the minimum amount is not yet reached because their business is no more available?
Interesting, just another lesson on why you need to diversify. You never know when your business model may get turned upside down.
ReplyDeleteOhhhh I didn't know this Martin! So I guess we're affected since we're using most of the programs u mentioned he he... thanks for the heads up! :)
ReplyDeleteMartin, I totally agree with Rick, and would add that although there are many opportunities online, don't bet your life, wife or pocketbook on ANYTHING. "Your blog came into this world with nothing, and to nothing it shall return." Or something like that.
ReplyDeleteIt will be a interesting thing to see what the companies do, as you mention, will we get paid what we are owed by other companies even if they know that we are not at the minimum payout threshold, personally I think they should!
ReplyDeleteWow. Thank you for this heads up. I wonder how the companies will react to accommodate this move.
ReplyDeleteI just joined MyLikes the other day and now I'm a little irritated by the changes. It's difficult to keep up with everyone's policies.
ReplyDeleteWell this is unfortunate. Though thanks for the heads up, as I was looking for a paid tweet site to sign up to, thanks for warning me.
ReplyDeleteI say Twitter should go for it!
ReplyDeleteHaving a time line filled with ads isn't a pleasant experience, if I may say so.
When a twitter account is monetized, as long as the owner of that account is keep on maintaining the account with useful information, I still can accept that. But when the account is only tweeting about promotional tweet, then it's worth to be unfollowed.