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Twitter Seeks to Make Money From It's Free Service

The Los Angeles Times covers Twitter's recently announced plans to commercialize its free service by allowing "promoted tweets" to appear at the top of search results and ultimately will appear within user Twitter feeds as well:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/04/twitter-unveils-plan-to-make-money-from-advertising.html

How it works: Promoted Tweets lets brands place short messages at the top of search result. One ad will remain at the top of each page of search results. Advertisers will be charged on a cost-per-thousand basis. Twitter will also play around with other payment possibilities.

The promoted tweets that will appear within the user feeds later this year are reported to be designed to be "useful" to users:

The company is taking a cautious approach. Promoted Tweets will deliver relevant information, and those that do not draw interest from users will disappear, he said.

“We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you,” Stone said.

The announcement did not make it clear if the promoted tweets that appear in a user's Twitter feed would also appear on 3rd party sites that potentially display that user's feed. This could potentially be embarrassing if the ads competed with the 3rd party's brand.

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