Twitter takes advertising in Japan

Twitter is one of those tools that is currently hot and many agencies are jumping on it as a tool to sell to their clients, or clients are using themsleves, with various degrees of success. A poor example is Diageo’s The Bar, which I’m not surprised stopped broadcasting a month ago; good examples include Dell (who have far too many accounts to list) and SouthWest Airlines.. Tara has an excellent post about Corporate Tweeting which is must read.

But as with all web companies, the question must be asked about how are they making revenue to pay for everything? There’s no ads yet and there’s no subscriptions, 2 common models. They do append tips to the text messages, which many assume is a ‘test’ for adding ads at the later date. Another glimpse into the future is what has happened on the Japanese version of the site which launched this week. Joi Ito, one of the investers, has the story, as does the Twitter Blog. I’d show you a screenshot but they’re obviously using IP detection as I get redirected to the .com version and can’t access the Japanese version at all. If I could, I’d be able to see that they are displaying ads in the top right corner. They’re taking ads from Toyota, which links through to an automotive news service on Twitter and for a new book about Twitter. In this case, both ads are relevant to the service, providing value, so may not be that intrusive. Hopefully, when it comes to the ads appearing on the .com version (and I’m guessing they will) they’ll be just as relevant.