How Will Twitter's New Policies Affect Sponsored Tweets & Other Third-Party Advertisers?

Popular microblogging network Twitter recently announced that it will no longer allow third-party companies to send ads in user feeds. Businesses like Sponsored Tweets that earn money from advertising "Tweets" may have to pay Twitter in some form or fashion yet to be determined. On blog.twitter.com is stated the rationale behind the new terms of service:

Twitter - Extensibility, Functionality & User Experience

"The three mechanisms most important to building such a platform are architecting for extensibility, providing a robust API to the platform's functionality, and ensuring the long-term health and value of the user experience... As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience."

Twitter - Third Parties No Longer Allowed to Inject Paid Ads into a Timeline

With this in mind, the company announced that they would no longer allow "any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API." Instead, Twitter is directing advertisers to Twitter's own Promoted Tweets.

How Will Twitter's New Policies Affect Sponsored Tweets & Other Third-Party Advertisers?

So, how will Twitter's new policies affect the various new companies like Sponsored Tweets which pays Twitter users to post commercial content? As reported in Sponsored Tweets: Smart Idea or Twitter Spam?, IZEA launched their Sponsored Tweets service last fall to mixed reviews. While some in the Twitter community applauded the opportunity to develop a small revenue stream by getting paid to post ads, others felt like multiple repeated ads were spammish and hurt the integrity of not only the person posting the ads, but possibly even the integrity of Twitter itself. While the merits of Sponsored Tweets continue to be debated by Twitter users, it is unclear how Twitter's new TOS will effect the service. It appears that several factors will be considered, including determining how "inserting ads into a timeline" will be defined.

Ted Murphy, Chief Executive of Izea/Sponsored Tweets

According to social.venturebeat.com, Ted Murphy, chief executive of Izea, the company that runs Sponsored Tweets, has indicated they are going to be using less automated ads in lieu of having people manually rewrite or copy and paste their ads which Murphy says won't violate the new rules.

"Twitter maintains that they don't seek to control what a user tweets," states Murphy, pointing to a statement in the Twitter blog. "There are no rules prohibiting people sharing sponsored or commercial messages, they just don't want it automated through an API."

However, given Twitter's concern that too many poorly targeted ads look like spam and might drive users away, the future is unclear for third-party advertisers on Twitter, including Twivert, Tweetup, Magpie and Sponsored Tweets. While Sponsored Tweets now describes their service as "whitelisted," it will more important than ever for Sponsored Tweets users to use common sense in how many ads they accept and how often they chose to Tweet them. (See Sponsored Tweets: Smart Idea or Twitter Spam?)

Sources:

Twitter Blog

Sponsored Tweets: Smart Idea or Twitter Spam?

TweetUp, Sponsored Tweets say they dodge Twitter's new restrictions