Twitter has unveiled its long-awaited monetisation plans. Through a programme called Promoted Tweets, the company will allow businesses to bid on keywords, similar to Google’s highly successful AdWords system.
Twitter gave details to the New York Times and AdAge, which posted their stories late on Monday night San Francisco time.
According to those reports, the system will allow advertisers to bid on keywords on a CPM basis. When a user searches for a term on search.twitter.com, one ad will show up at the top of the stream and be identified as a “promoted” tweet. Initial advertisers include Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy.
The move comes a day ahead of Chirp, Twitter’s inaugural developers conference, which begins on Wednesday in San Francisco. It also follows by a day the debut of TweetUp, a company that was seeking to use a nearly identical approach to cash in on tweets.
It was just on Friday that Twitter bought Tweetie, a popular iPhone client. With Twitter now in the business of search ads and building clients for multiple platforms, developers at Chirp will likely be looking for answers as to what part of the Twitter ecosystem they should focus on.
