Illuminati Karate, Inc. » twitter http://illuminatikarate.com creative web design, development and marketing Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:13:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Twitter Gets Ads, Courtesy of Federated Media and Microsoft http://illuminatikarate.com/blog/twitter-gets-ads-courtesy-of-federated-media-and-microsoft/ http://illuminatikarate.com/blog/twitter-gets-ads-courtesy-of-federated-media-and-microsoft/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:23:51 +0000 George Huger http://illuminatikarate.com/blog/?p=126 Twitter Ads We've Seen So FarOver the last week you’ve probably noticed the “definitions” (read: ads) in the Twitter sidebar. Until today, they’ve been promoting Twitter’s in-house services, such as encouraging users to add a Twitter widget to their blog. But as of today we’ve started seeing three different offsite ads appearing in this space, pictured in the image to the left. Further investigation reveals that these ads represent the launch of a new monetization strategy for Twitter.

The ads promote 3 services that we’ve seen so far:

  1. Tweetie, a Twitter client for iPhone
  2. Twittervision, a mashup showing live tweets on a Google map thats been around for quite a while
  3. Exec Tweets, a new directory and tweet aggregator of selected business executives

The third site, ExecTweets, is the most interesting in terms of Twitter’s business model. Its a new site created by John Battelle’s Federated Media and sponsored by Microsoft. It aggregates tweets from the leaders of big brand companies like eBay, digg, and Zappos, with a user voting system built in to help prioritize the stream.

Its a great fit, as Mr. Battelle has been teaching us about conversational marketing for some time and defending Twitter’s value before everyone else seemed to get it. Federated Media sells ad inventory for sites popular with the early adopter crowd such as TechCrunch, digg, and boingboing, so they should know how to market to Twitter’s current audience. We haven’t been able to find any details as to whom is paying whom for what, but its safe to assume that the privilege did not come cheaply.

One thing that is sure to raise some eyebrows amongst the SEO community is that the ad links are dofollowed (i.e. not nofollowed). The ads are embedded in the site’s HTML, not loaded by external Javascript files, so they will be indexed by search engine crawlers. Considering the enormous domain authority of Twitter and the fact that nearly every other external link on twitter.com is nofollowed, these links could pass a lot of PageRank.

More coverage of the new partnership can be found on the official Twitter blog, Battelle Media, and Venture Beat.

Do you have a Twitter account? Follow the official Illuminati Karate (@ill_k) twitter stream for industry news and tips on web development and search engine optimization.

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