It was pretty painful sifting through Twitter last night after news surfaced that the social network hasn’t been displaying advertisements to some of its more valuable users. Suddenly, it felt like my entire timeline was filled with braggarts, each one exclaiming that they “hadn’t seen an ad in forever!” It was a cool way of saying, hey, I’m one of Twitter’s most valuable users.
Ugh.
Anyway, for the rest of the world, yes, Twitter has been showing advertisements in the form of promoted posts. However, it turns out that the company has indeed turned off those ads for “its most prominent and active users,” Re/code explained. “For those people, Twitter is an ad-free, or nearly ad-free, experience.”
The changes were apparently made to attract people – probably a lot of verified and frequent users – to the social network without deterring them to turn elsewhere. “Twitter sources say the company doesn’t select the no-ad or low-ad group purely by star power, but by a variety of criteria, including the volume and reach of the tweets they generate.”
It’s a sound business strategy, I guess, to keep your most prominent users happy. On the other hand, they’re also the users who would probably be eyeing ads more frequently. Whatever keeps the conversation going, right?
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