It might seem like there are no more horizons for Twitter to cross, no more expanses to cover or communication barriers to break down. However, there is one more frontier for the ubiquitous messaging service, though it might only appeal to its investors.
Twitter announced Thursday (Dec. 10) that it would finally begin the long-rumored process of showing ads to non-registered viewers of its site. According to a blog post by Deepak Rao, revenue product manager at Twitter, nearly 500 million people navigate to Twitter each month but don’t view ads because they either don’t have or forget to log into accounts. However, now Twitter will be able to massively boost its audience and ad impression rates, all with the simple flip of a switch.
“By letting marketers scale their campaigns and tap into the total Twitter audience, they will be able to speak to more people in new places using the same targeting, ad creative and measurement tools,” Rao explained. “Marketers can now maximize the opportunities they have to connect with that audience.”
This is no pet project for Twitter, as COO and Head of Revenue Adam Bain told Re/code that the company expects to be able to monetize ads to non-users at about half the rate of its user-facing spots. Because they show up organically in timelines, new viewers shouldn’t receive too much of a shock with the change and should be able to familiarize themselves with how they work fairly quickly.
“I’m not suggesting that logged-out will be as high signal as search results in Twitter, but we do have a lot of great signal that we’ll use about the context that user is in to bring relevant ads to the table,” Bain said.
While targeting these non-logged-in users will prove a challenge for Twitter, simply getting any ads in front of their eyes is better than nothing.
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