Twitter Starts Selling Ads to Third-Party Apps and Websites

Twitter has announced a step to push its advertising products to third-party apps and websites with the company’s first syndication partnerships with Flipboard and Yahoo Japan.

The social media company will start to run its core “Promoted Tweet” ad unit in places other than Twitter, in an effort to monetize the millions of people who see Tweets on television, mobile apps and other websites. Although the company has stated that Tweets received 185 billion impressions off Twitter during the third quarter of 2014, it didn’t have a way to monetize those impressions until now.

“For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience,” Twitter Senior Product Director Ameet Renadive explained in a blog post. “Twitter syndicated ads will be seen by users within Twitter content sections on third-party properties, as well as within third-party content areas.”

Considering the fact that Tweets are seen in a multitude of places beyond Twitter, this move is a logical step that could provide marketers with greatly increased reach for their campaigns. Brands that are already buying ads on Twitter will now be able to run the same ads, in the same format, on places outside of Twitter.

Twitter has been talking for a long time about the fact that its audience is much larger than the 284 million users who log into the service, but it hasn’t yet provided a substantial way to gauge this reach. With the just-announced partnerships with the news-reading app Flipboard and Yahoo Japan, advertisers are being provided with a new opportunity to reach people outside of the social media network with their Promoted Tweets.

For the media partners, such as Flipboard, this move will provide them with another way to earn ad revenue. Flipboard already sells its own full-screen ads in other parts of its app, and explains that the Promoted Tweets will appear in a designated section.

“The biggest thing we get out of it is for the first time getting access to Promoted Tweets,” said Eric Feng, Chief Technology Officer at Flipboard. “It’s been performing incredibly well so for us to have access to that unit outside of Flipboard is incredibly powerful in terms of expanding our monetization capabilities inside of our app.”

However, it’s yet to be seen whether or not this move will create a significant opportunity for Twitter. The social media company will be sharing the ad revenue with its media partners, but Twitter and Flipboard have both declined to comment on how this split will work. Additionally, some industry experts have expressed skepticism about the idea that other big media companies will want to be involved, given the uncertainty of why they would let Twitter sell advertising on their apps and websites when they can do that themselves. One such example comes from the ESPN SportsCenter app, which contains a “Now” tab that displays a feed of Tweets sent from ESPN journalists and sports teams. Clearly, this app is already using its own method for exposing non-users to Twitter content, and may not choose to get involved in this new advertising initiative.

There are others, however, who see this new move as a viable one that may prove to be successful. Ian Schafer, CEO of the digital ad agency Deep Focus, stated that this initiative is less about the initial partnerships and instead is more about the potential for brands to reach a broader audience with Twitter’s personal and targeting data. “The idea is a big one,” Schafer said. “If they can succeed in programming the Internet with ads driven by immediacy of data, that’s a game changer for them and us. This is very promising.”

We’ll be watching to see if Twitter is able to secure partnerships with other publishers in the near future.