Twitter Tuesday - Ads in third-party apps? Seriously?

Filed under: Features, Web services, Social Software, Microblogging

As we mentioned last week, Twitter ad networks aren't dead. In fact, it looks like they're just getting warmed up. Ad.ly is getting ready to launch ads in third-party Twitter clients, which is a whole new level of Twitter advertising. Ad.ly for Apps serves location-based ads to users, in-stream, right in a Twitter client. It's got an API, making it pretty easy to build into other Twitter apps. The big question is ... why would app creators want to do this? If you were a developer, the return would have to be pretty huge before you'd sell out your users and give a cut to Ad.ly, right?

Plus, it's not entirely clear that this is legit under Twitter's new TOS, which bans "in-stream" advertising. Ad.ly for Apps is technically "on top of" the stream, not "in-stream," but from a user's perspective, it's just about the same thing. It'll be interesting to see whether Twitter drops the hammer on this kind of thing. On one hand, I really, really hate ads in my Twitter. I'd rather pay for an ad-free version of a good app. On the other, it might be nuts for Twitter to tell independent developers what their apps can or can't display.

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Twitter Tuesday - Ads in third-party apps? Seriously? originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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