News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week. Parent comment

Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by wslh on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @11:13AM (#12644483)
Companies are paying a lot, the problem is that you don't have a lower tier. Just to compare, in AdWords you can pay $ 5 if you want, you are not forced to have a budget of a thousands. AdWords was revolutionary in that aspect, before them you needed to have a budget for advertising in Yahoo or other networks.

I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by rch on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @01:36PM (#12645936)
The problem with monetizing the Twitter stream is that you need rather a lot of data, often in real time, to do much of anything. So the minimum useful tier is accordingly expensive to provide.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by wslh on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @04:28PM (#12647524)
You can summarize interesting information and charge for that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by criddell on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @01:57PM (#12646154)
The depressing thing for me is to know that when they show me a Starbucks ad, Twitter makes pennies for that. I would much rather just pay those pennies myself and not see ads.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by Klathmon on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @02:15PM (#12646326)
I feel a bit like a shill because of how much I bring it up, but checkout Google Contributor[0].

It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded.

It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going.

I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015

[0]https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by sunnyps on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @02:40PM (#12646557)
I think you're underselling Google Contributor by not mentioning its killer feature: replacing banner ads with cat photos.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by criddell on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @02:20PM (#12646374)
I signed up for $5 / month, but I also run an adblocker for performance and security reasons. I don't usually use the $5.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week by Klathmon on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @02:26PM (#12646428)
Yeah, if you block the ads they will never show, so you won't be paying the site operator for the ad spots.
[ Parent | on HN ]