I’m a huge user of Twitter and spend more time staring at a Twitter feed than pretty much any other online/PC/mobile utility. Collectively, literally more than an hour or two a day, my eyes glance at a feed delivered to me on top of Twitter. In terms of time spent, maybe my email client is close, but that’s about it. Like most of us, I do this increasingly on a mobile device. Thanks to the excellent Twitter iPad, iPhone and more-than-adequate (but not perfect) desktop apps, I rarely use Twitter’s web service. Because of all this, I have never seen a “promoted trend”, “promoted tweet”, or “promoted account”. Twitter and Facebook largely place advertising around the stream — in the chrome to the right of the feed. I know Twitter is experimenting with in-stream ads, but they are largely absent from Twitter clients today.
At Facebook, there is great resistance internally (and from some users) to the idea of putting ads into the newsfeed. Most believe that it would be a huge turnoff to their users. So Facebook is inventing some really cool social ad products that appear in the ad gutter to the right of the feed. But you never see these ads on Facebook’s mobile apps. And increasingly, that is where all our eyeballs are going, right? Even Facebook has admitted that a large amount of their future growth is expected to come from mobile products. So, where do the ads go?
I think they are going in the feed. They need to be highly targeted, socially influenced, and tastefully produced. They should solicit feedback from us and operate like content (contain links, be informative, utilize the conventions of the platform like hashtags, etc.)
I feel like it is 1995 again and we have the opportunity to invent the banner ad. There really is very little traction around what in-stream ads will look like. I am a firm believer that more and more of our time will be spent consuming information and media in streams. And if our eyeballs go there, advertisers will follow.
Definitely agree David. As things head more towards mobile there has to be an in-stream advertising option or Facebook and Twitter will really suffer from a revenue perspective.
What will be interesting is if there is an opportunity in any way for third parties to get involved like with normal display advertising today. At this point it seems unlikely that Facebook and Twitter will allow that, but I bet that’s a major part of Bill Gross’ strategy with UberMedia.
One opportunity for third parties will be on other publishers. It’s becoming more and more common for other applications to have news/activity feeds on their services. Seems like the ad network model can be extended to selling in-stream ads for other publishers and mobile applications.
Hopefully we take advantage of social tools and targeting to make those ads as relevant as possible to the services that people are using.
These are great comments, Pat. I do lament that Facebook has kept their ad platform so closed (like Google Search) as compared to display advertising. We have yet to see what Twitter will do here, but they seem to be following Google (search) and Facebook’s direction. I do agree that the Bill Gross moves are clearly aimed at trying to come up with an alternative. I also agree with you that we will see streams all over the web. For advertising to work, however, scale is required, so some aggregation will be necessary to achieve that.
Is this a joke?? The LAST thing I want to see is in-stream ads. I delete all the ads from FaceBook. GlimmerBlocker is the best app I’ve downloaded to my Mac. Really, you guys, not me nor anyone I know actually BUYS anything because of these ads–certainly not from those uniformly awful and annoying banner ads. And I’m no crank. I’m just a 57-year-old woman who has more sense than to passively put up with this constant ad bombardment and be a good little sheep consumer.
Hi Meg,
I hate defending advertising, because so much of it is so bad and ineffective. However, it is hard to dispute that without it, most of the internet would NOT be free. Although I don’t like most advertising I see, I appreciate that it allows me to consume huge amounts of content without paying. For that reason, in order to keep things like Facebook and Twitter free, they both will excel at advertising solutions for brands and marketers. My post is really a challenge to all of us to come up with ad formats for streams that don’t suck (like the banner ad does).
Agreed, as someone who operated as a publisher for 10 years and then worked for an advertising company working with publishers every day I learned firsthand that “evil advertising” is necessary to make so much that we do on the web free. Would it really be a better web if every site and service that we wanted to try was hitting us with fees every time we tried to access them?
David’s right that the mission should continue to be on how to make advertising more relevant, more helpful, targeted better, and something that users can value. In some ways that’s asking a lot, but it’s a mission that all advertisers and publishers have to continue working on.
Meg,
No one really WANTS ads in their stream, but Twitter and Facebook don’t run on air. I would suggest that those who don’t want ads be given the choice of paying a nominal fee of say $9.95 per year to use the platform ad-free.
That’s where we’re headed.
Yes, but what will be the price per year for these services when they are monetizing freely and at scale, i.e. what is the lifetime value of a user, and what would a user need to pay to ensure the platform provider is making as much or more off of them than monetizing that user via advertising? Of course, as the number of users who opt-in to the ad-free environment rise, so does the cost to use the platform ad-free (as the ad dollars shrink)…
This comment reminds me of an ad survey in the 90′s in which many respondents said “advertising doesn’t influence me, i only buy brands”
Twitter and Facebook are most likely well aware of what you’ve mentioned here. I just hope they stay away from my feed and mobile products. Let them make their money off of farmville.
I totally agree. People don’t like the idea of any ads but they also don’t like the idea of paying (or paying more) for products.
Most ad innovation is laughed at by the tech elite until it proves to be effective. We invested in Overture, who as you know created “sponsored search.” Google laughed at the company because they didn’t want to become “an advertising company.”
18 months ago I invested in Ad.ly under the presume that ads should be “in stream.” Yes, they have to be high quality. We focus on frequency capping, brand / publisher (person Tweeting or FB’ing) authenticity, efficacy of publisher, etc.
We’ve seen good, steady growth over this period. Brands and agencies are delighted by the performance but the tech elite are still luke warm.
The issue with Promoted trends goes beyond what happens if somebody sees the ad. It also is an issue for people who do see the ad. The problem is the the brand doesn’t control the message. So if you promote your product, the community can simply add the word “sucks” after your message. Twitter saw this themselves when they promoted “TwitterMobile” on the day they cancelled UberTwitter.
If you’re interested I wrote my views on “the case for in-stream ads” 18 months ago. It is here: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/22/the-case-for-in-stream-advertising/
Thanks, Mark. I have read this post and it was an inspiration for some of my thinking. I think Twitter and FB possess the most data to enable to most relevant social targeting so it has been hard for third parties to generate what I think the native platforms will ultimately control. I wish FB and Twitter’s ad ecosystems would be open like the display ad web, but I think they will be semi-closed like Google search.
David, great post. I think in-stream can work and work well, just needs to be delivered with a lot of targeting and relevance for the consumer. Since you noted that you are rarely on Twitter.com and for that reason, don’t see the “promoted trends, tweets, and accounts” – twitter is cutting biz dev deals with the HootSuite’s of the world and syndicating into their platforms. See the screenshot of a HootSuite interface with a promoted @adexchanger tweet. http://ow.ly/i/8pDq
Yes, totally agree about the need for best-in-class targeting. I know my post is really about impatience, because I do know that Twitter will soon bring promoted tweets to the other clients. Amazing it is not in their own clients!
David, Thank you for the thoughtful post. The fear of in-stream advertising is often rooted in a misunderstanding in the potential of the user experience. We’ve seen this happen before. Much like Google created a context for semi relevant, contextual advertisements in search, a similar evolutionary experience will occur in-stream (and it’s already happening). These things take time–time for users and advertisers to feel equally comfortable with the new medium. As Mark pointed out, we all demand free social products and as Facebook and Twitter mover further down the monetization path they’ll soon realize the power of this type of advertising unit. Of course, I am biased as co-founder of Ad.ly but I can tell you firsthand, it’s clear to me the combination of profile, conversational and graph data will soon produce a context where all parties–users, advertisers and operators–will be pleased.
The problem is that with the current frequency of ads on the Internet, the stream would become useless and inundated with ads vs. content from connections.
Furthermore, brands can already leverage the streams organically by driving followers and fans. Once they have achieved that opt in status, those postings appear in users’ streams.
Ditto what Eric Fader said…the post, and the comments here, put me in mind of Winnie the Pooh’s Heffalumps: don’t eat the honey of my connections’ feedstream!
See more if you’d like here, and thanks for the Heffalumps:
http://bit.ly/eEuctG
I think the FEAR is tricking me that a “Status update” or a “tweet” is an Ad. People get angry or even feel betrayed. The media I am consuming should be what I asked. Not something else masquerading as the media I asked for.
Facebook already HAS ads on the side bar, that are context sensitive and targeted at me. I doubt that adding them to the status feed is good.
Twitter has a serious challenge – there are SO many twitter users that are NOT using the standard “twitter” interfaces. So intermixing “sponsored” tweets was a way to somehow trick other twitter clients into generating revenue for twitter. But I also think it’s at the real heart of Twitter generating “official” twitter clients for iPhone etc (even Twitter for Mac). Since owning the entire UI gives you far more revenue potential than just being a “live RSS feed”.
I certainly agree that Facebook and Twitter can do a better job of intermixing commercial speech with the user’s media, but if they have to “trick” me into looking at it, it will just increase the mental fatigue of users.
We ALREADY have too much data. Users complain about the mental effort it takes just to manage their facebook feeds. Giving me more crap I need to filter is a bad idea.
The Facebook “like” button is a good compromise: Let me establish a relationship with a vendor and then when I get communication from them it FEELS more relevant (even if it is just an ad). And let me click that “don’t show this to me any more button”.
Twitter has a more serious problem in trying to generate the same kind of experience (and turn it into revenue for Twitter).
David, thanks for writing this post, it has sparked an important debate.
I think in-stream advertising will only get effective when it starts to become indistinguishable from the content itself, and its getting pretty close.
For example, I dont mind seeing Microsoft XBOX posting stuff on my wall if I have explicitly decided to follow them on FB & get tweets from them on Twitter – I’ve opted in to hearing from them. Moreover, I am in control and can turn them off if they get too noisy. Over time, both sides understand the extent to which getting into the user stream is acceptable.
Like in television content, the notion of product placements in the social stream could be a significant breakthrough.
Another key element missing on FB & Twitter today is a recommendation engine similar to Amazon that can introduce me to other brands, products, artists, etc that I might enjoy engaging with based on “like” and “follow” activities.
Challenge obviously is in keeping it tasteful, so that Meg and other users like her dont get turned off.
Miten, I totally agree with your point that in-stream ads, to be effective, have to mimic the format and value of the content itself. I don’t think, however, recommendation engines will work for brands in nearly the same way as social recommendations (ie, digital word of mouth) work. For me, that’s the real promise of ads/brands on FB/Twitter — namely I get interested in new ones because it is what my friends like.
Oh yes I completely overlooked the social curation elements of FB & Twitter that can’t beat by algorithms.
A little late to read this blog but one of the areas where I can see Facebook or Twitter make money without annoying regular users is when companies start becoming active on social media.
By active, it is not having a Facebook page or a twitter. But be able to attract customers to sign up for specific feeds from companies – eg. not feeds from amazon, but feeds on new products and discounts on amazon for photography related products.
Facebook and Twitter should work out a plan to help companies sign up customers for such feeds and get paid for that.
Agree. I expect we will see both companies offer pay-per-fan and pay-per-follow paid advertising models for brands.
Guarding against over-monetizing is a very pertinent tip. Nobody likes the ads……really. And if there are too many of them, it seriously detracts from the user experience. Listen to the man, he speaks the truth!