Twitter bans ads from other companies

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Financial Times:

Twitter, the micro-blogging website, has banned other companies from inserting adverts into its endless stream of short messages as it continues to exert greater control over its wide-reaching platform.

The move follows Twitter’s unveiling of its own advertising system last month and could jeopardise several companies seeking to ride on the popularity of the site, which has attracted 100m users in the four years of its existence.

Sean Corcoran of Forrester Research said: “It’s about gaining a level of control, so they can manage the experience. And it’s a level of revenue protection”.

Twitter said adverts from other companies could be confusing to users and unfairly burden the host.

It said in blog post: “Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service.

“Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support e-mails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.”

It added that it now had more than 200 employees to sustain.
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It sounds like Twitter wants to corner the market for its own software. I'm not sure if that's really a smart business model or not.