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Twitter Finally Receives Some Ad Revenue

Interestingly, Twitter's first real foray into advertising comes by way of Microsoft. But don't panic, says Peter Kafka: "You won't be getting come-ons for Vista in your Twitterstream" or anything like that -- the new Microsoft ad buy is relatively mild stuff.

Via Federated Media, John Battelle's conversational marketing company, the software giant is sponsoring a new product called ExecTweets, which is basically a page that collects tweets from various noteworthy executives. Twitter gets an undisclosed payment for Microsoft's sponsorship and for promoting the site on its service. According to Kafka, this is the first of many programs FM will be launching on Twitter with other clients.

"As advertising goes, this is pretty innocuous," Kafka says, "but it's also hard to imagine that many people will see the ads at all since the majority of Twitter use happens off the site, on mobile apps like Twitterific for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and desktop clients like Tweetdeck." He says it's also hard to imagine many people wanting to use ExecTweet, because part of the joy of Twitter's service is discovery, and not subscribing to a common, mass thread. However, as uninteresting as ExecTweet might sound, nothing about it required Twitter's OK, Kafka notes, because the company's open API allows users to repurpose the site's data for their apps. That said, it's pretty exciting that a branding campaign has finally been launched with Twitter's blessing, even if it's been done in a relatively minor way.

Read the whole story at D: All Things Digital »

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