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Twitter Apparently Clones Pownce’s Business Model
Anyone remember Pownce? They are the so-called Twitter clone that came out of the gate with a business model, that is injecting advertising into the stream of content from you and your friends. Now Twitter has gone and cloned the clone. Of course ads in the stream is about the easiest business model there is.
This morning Duncan Riley is reporting that some Twitter users have noted ads in their stream as well. I haven’t seen any ads yet and I’ve refreshed several times, tried visiting other pages, etc. Twitter needs a business plan now and advertising might just be the first step. Some have speculated that they are aggregating and selling data trends, though I doubt it. My guess is that the team has more coming in terms of monetization, especially when the apps built on the platform are already generating income. My business model idea is opt-in marketing for brands replacing email lists.
We’ve written about Twitter’s business model several times.
Don’t forget, Twitter has a song now – that means a lot towards something. Lastly, you can follow me on Twitter.
Update: I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like Duncan’s source is now saying that the supposed ad was just her background image and not an advertisement. As I noted above, selling ads would be only the first step to monetization and frankly wouldn’t be as effective as other potential ideas.
Update 2: Peter Kafka asked Twitter founder Biz Stone about ads on Twitter and his reply was "no".
Allen,
I’d welcome ads on Twitter as it’s a service that has become a distinct part of many of our lives and it’d please me to see Biz and co. find some monetization. That being said, to state that Twitter is cloning a clone is, well, just kind of inflammatory only for the sake of being so.
Pownce has no IP on the ad injection. They weren’t even the first to do it, not even vaguely. Blogs have run medium box ads after blog posts for quite some time now, there isn’t much difference in concept.
And getting even closer in terms of implementation, Gabe Rivera at TechMeme pioneered the model that Pownce cloned.
Blake,
“Broadcast and print media have proven that users don’t have to immediately consume an advertised product. Click-throughs count for more, of course, but presence is valuable in its own right.”
It’s ironic, but digital advertising often gets less leeway than broadcast and print media with quite a few advertisers. Digital advertising has been built up as the most accountable, trackable form of advertising there available.
For most advertisers, tracking the results of a print or television campaign is obviously not as easy and is less accurate than tracking the results of a digital campaign. They may think that a print or television campaign isn’t doing well, but they *know* when a digital campaign isn’t doing well.
One of the facts many technologists would be surpised to learn if they went behind the scenes in the advertising industry is that many people in the industry don’t want to know if their campaigns are performing poorly because it’s not in their interest to know. Thus, you should not assume that digital advertising on a service like Twitter will be treated the same way as broadcast or print advertising because *knowing* that your advertising isn’t generating a return is not desirable.
“I don’t think anyone is making the argument to replace their mailing lists with Twitter. It’s a service that should be used for engaging mostly passive dialogs between a wide array of individuals and entities.”
Allen’s post states:
“My business model idea is opt-in marketing for brands replacing email lists.”
I was simply addressing that.
“Barring all of that, Twitter is still in its infancy and, what’s more, the concept of micro-blogging, while not exactly new (see:Kottke.org), is a medium that the masses are still trying to figure out exactly what they want to do with it.”
The “masses” are not trying to figure out exactly what they want to do with Twitter because they don’t know about it and most mainstream Americans are too busy and disinterested to waste time microblogging.
Technologists are trying to figure out exactly what they think the masses want to do with Twitter.
The answer: nothing.
If you show ads to people who rarely click on ads, is it advertising?
And Allen, do you really believe that Twitter is a viable replacement for the average business email list? *Everybody* has email. Walk down any street outside of Silicon Valley and ask “What’s Twitter?” and see how many people can answer.
There’s absolutely no value whatsoever in replacing an email list with Twitter unless your customer base consists solely of people like Robert Scoble. And that’s a very, very small market.
Drama,
Broadcast and print media have proven that users don’t have to immediately consume an advertised product. Click-throughs count for more, of course, but presence is valuable in its own right.
And you shouldn’t think of Twitter as a replacement to email lists, because it’s not. It’s a micro-blogging platform. If leveraged properly it can be made useful in ways that email can’t compete with (though there are an equal number of ways that Twitter can’t compete with email, but that’s another post).
I don’t think anyone is making the argument to replace their mailing lists with Twitter. It’s a service that should be used for engaging mostly passive dialogs between a wide array of individuals and entities.
Barring all of that, Twitter is still in its infancy and, what’s more, the concept of micro-blogging, while not exactly new (see:Kottke.org), is a medium that the masses are still trying to figure out exactly what they want to do with it.
So prudence warrants giving it a hot second to deal with its identity crisis, before we cast it aside — there is value there both economically and intellectually, we just have to figure out how to effectively stimulate the former and harvest the latter.
Drama,
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to respond to this yesterday. I can say for a fact that your assessment about the advertising industry not wanting “to know [when] their campaigns are performing poorly because it’s not in their interest to know,” is dead wrong. Ad executives (and I’m speaking broadly, but I live and work in NYC, where I know more than a few ad executives), are, for the most part, tireless in following the metrics of their ads because, like you pointed out, “Digital advertising has been built up as the most accountable, trackable form of advertising there available.”
You have delineate between the different types of views. The Internet is a mixed media platform, and such, advertising on it has many heads. Pageviews are but one method of measuring the efficiency of advertisement, and I think it’s the most traditional approach because it’s nearest to that of old media (ie how many people have, at the very least, been exposed to our branding?). That why it’s a valid, but not end-all number. There is definitely a push to establish additional, harder metrics with which to add more value to Online ads.
This is why agencies are looking the most obvious metrics in click-throughs, but also looking at things like time spent on a site and uniques vs impressions. Which isn’t to say you were wrong, really, I just think you might have jumped the gun on some of your statements.
Speaking of which, I definitely jumped the gun in speaking out about business email lists. Admittedly, I just skimmed the article and seized mainly upon a few points which, obfuscated the remainder of the post and compelled me to comment straight away.
Additionally, you’re mostly right on the current state of Twitter. No one really knows what to do with it. It’s there, we use it and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s not ready for prime time consumption for about 100 reasons, but I disagree implicitly that there is “nothing” useful that it can be leveraged for.
Blake,
I did not state that the entire advertising industry doesn’t want to know how their campaigns are performing. I stated that “many people in the industry don’t want to know if their campaigns are performing poorly.”
While everybody touts that they’re focused on metrics and metrics are important to the industry, I personally know people in the industry who joke (on a personal level, of course) about how they like campaigns that are harder to track.
Advertising is a tough business and let’s face it: advertising effectively is difficult these days. The less tangible data you have, the easier it is to spin the results. Does this mean that the industry and the people in it are intentionally trying to push clients away from more accountable forms of advertising? No. And I’m not saying that the people I’m referring to aren’t, for the most part, trying to do a good job.
My point is simply that sometimes knowing that your campaign isn’t doing well is a lot worse than being left to wonder how it’s doing. In other words, the phrase “ignorance is bliss” reflects the part of our human nature that sometimes just doesn’t want to know.
In terms of Twitter and usefulness, let’s distinguish between practical application and theoretical application. There’s probably a theoretical application for everything, Twitter included. Does that mean that there’s a viable practical application? No.
As I stated in my original rant about Twitter:
“At the end of the day, I think Twitter, and technologies like it, are, for the most part, useless given the ways most people use them.”
I stand by this and believe that Twitter will never gain mass adoption (like MySpace, for instance) because its practical application provides little to no value to the average mainstream Internet user.