Twitter is now selling ads that will run outside of Twitter.
Today, with a blog post, the company announced that it would begin syndicating its Promoted Tweets outside on other online services. The ad unit will first appear on the social news app Flipboard as well as Yahoo Japan.
Essentially, Twitter is letting advertisers who are already running marketing campaigns on the social network to flaunt those same ads outside of the Twitter timeline, in a format native to whatever platform it lands on. So a Promoted Tweet on Flipboard will look like any other tweet that had been embedded on Flipboard in the first place. According to tech news site Re/code, Twitter and the third-party platform will divvy up the proceeds that the ad drives.
For Twitter, adding one more stream of revenue makes good sense. Now a public company, Twitter has been feeling the heat from its investors, who have pointed to its slow growth and tepid user engagement as reasons for concern. And though Twitter doesn’t acknowledge it outright, its latest effort is yet another attempt to compete with rival Facebook. Late last year, Facebook launched Atlas, a tool that allows brands to leverage Facebook’s trove of data to serve up targeted ads across the web. And just yesterday, the news emerged that Twitter was rolling out its algorithm-driven Instant Timeline---another tool that makes it more like Facebook.
