Go-Ahead for Magpie's In-Stream Advertising

Posted by Jan on May 31, 2010

Twitter’s New Terms Have Been Subject to Massive Misunderstandings

The past week has seen the Twitter community abuzz following the announcement by Twitter COO Dick Costolo regarding changes in the terms of service. Blogs and other media outlets were quick to proclaim the demise of in-stream advertising, which we were first to introduce in 2008 and have been running successfully since then. It now seems, however, that these commentators were a little too quick off the mark.

Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter, has now shed light upon the matter. In a recent mailing list comment, he clarifies the intentions of Twitter: “I want to make sure this part is clear — this policy change isn’t meant to say that we are going to start policing if the content of something a user tweets is an ad or not.” The initial statement by Dick Costolo, which many people found somewhat vague and brought about uncertainty in the entire industry (including us), has thereby been put more into perspective.

Our business as Magpie, an Advertising Network, is to connect twitterers and advertisers in order to create relevant, controlled and individualized sponsored conversations in a mutually beneficial partnership. With regards to such a model, Ryan Sarver continued in his post, giving the following example: “So if Liz is paid by Reebok to tweet about how much she loves their new shoes, we are not going to be policing that any more than we were on Friday. This policy also does not prohibit services […] that help facilitate those relationships or even help her post the ads to her timeline on her behalf.”

The question remaining is: which kinds of services are going to be forbidden by the new terms of service? It appears that Twitter client applications, rather than ad networks are targeted by Dick Costolo’s recent post. Ryan Sarver emphasizes this by further explaining: “It does prohibit an application from calling out to a service to find an ad to serve to Liz that will get inserted into the timeline she is viewing.”

We appreciate that Twitter has made the changes in policy more explicit and comprehensible and perfectly understand Dick’s concerns about the long-term health of Twitter as a platform. We totally agree that every third party must add value to the system. The idea of Magpie is to reward Twitter users for the valuable content they contribute to the network. In turn we enable prestigious brands such as Audi, Sony Playstation, or Bacardi as well as some 2,000 smaller and medium-sized businesses to participate and engage in social media.

Being a member of WOMMA (the Word of Mouth Marketing Association), Magpie is a first-mover in ethical and responsible word of mouth micro-blogging. As such, Magpie twitterers and advertisers needn’t be concerned, as Magpie’s tweets have long been fully disclosed and strictly compliant with the FTC rules.

Comments

lyle said on Monday, May 31, 2010:

To get around the new Twitter TOS cannot the twitterers write a derivative of the sponsored tweet and still give Magpie and advertiser the opportunity to continue with their business model?

Jan said on Monday, May 31, 2010:

The good news is that (while rephrasing is available as an optional feature) Twitterers don't *have to* rephrase to be compliant. Magpie remains compliant as it is.

seefahrt24 said on Wednesday, June 02, 2010:

Gibts die Informationen auch auf Deutsch?

Jan said on Wednesday, June 02, 2010:

I'm sorry, seefahrt24, the blog is only available in english, but you can use Google Translate to get the gist of it.

Unser Blog ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar, aber du kannst Google Translate verwenden, um das Wesentliche mitzubekommen.

Martin said on Friday, June 04, 2010:

But it means that Magpie and your competitors are no more allowed to insert the "paid" tweets via their API?

We have to tweet them manually as soon as it is reflected in the new Twitter TOS?

Jan Schulz-Hofen said on Friday, June 04, 2010:

No, in fact, nothing will have to change at all.