What Twitter Earns Each Time You Look at Your Feed

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/heres-exactly-what-twitter-earns-each-time-you-look-at-your-feed/280266/

by JumpCrisscross • 13 years ago

37 20 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

walid• 13 years ago

Advertising revenue seems larger in the USA in general. It is worth considering that most advertising based services are US based eg: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook.

jka• 13 years ago

I guess the closest analogy here is to CPM (cost per mille - thousand page views), for online display advertising. On that scale, $0.80 CPM is low; typical figures I've seen/heard are around the $10 mark.

That's probably related to the fact that Twitter is still relatively ad-free; it also means they have a lot of ceiling into which they can increase their revenue, albeit at the usual cost of negative user experience!

Has anyone here worked in advertising for social networks which use timeline-style feeds? I'd be interested to hear how (and if) the businesses practices differ from 'traditional' online advertising.

DavidAdams• 13 years ago

Very few media outlets make anywhere near $10 CPM these days.

laglad• 13 years ago

Yea, I work at an ad tech company. And the # is closer to $0.60 for the US.

001sky• 13 years ago

This article highlihts the dis-proportionate amount of revenues advertisers pay for "premium" demographics, noting that the USA yields ~$2.2 cpm and ROW around $0.30 cpm. This is a 7x multiple or premium for a USA user. It also raises the question of ultimate growth potential: the low value category are 3x more plentiful than the premium one in terms of subscriber base (and presumably growing faster, too).

danmaz74• 13 years ago

On the other hand, discretionary income is growing fast in many parts of the rest of the world.

nostromo• 13 years ago

May I compare apples to oranges?

$0.1 Google revenue per search.

$0.001 Twitter revenue per timeline view.

sejje2• 13 years ago

Yeah, the difference being nobody sits around refreshing their google searches.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

Im hard pressed to believe what you're suggesting

.1 vs .001 is a 100x difference

Do you spend 100x mor time on twitter

batiudrami• 13 years ago

But I do searches much more often than I check my Twitter feed (and I suspect I'd be in the majority, though there definitely is a set of very active Twitter users)

taralx2• 13 years ago

That's almost certainly because Google searches are significantly more likely to indicate purchasing intent. That means advertisers will pay more per search than per timeline view.

yashg• 13 years ago

Yes and for an advertiser a click through from Google is far more valuable than just a view on Twitter or Facebook. The latter is more of a brand building advertising. Google's is immediate revenue so advertiser is likely to pay more.

maxmcd2• 13 years ago

Wait, does google really get a $100 CPM? I know their revenue on search is immense, but is it really that high?

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

Well, Google doesn’t show one ad per SERP, it shows over a dozen. Also, ‘a search’ could be one search results page or several.

joeblau• 13 years ago

I don't see any ads in the Twitter app on Mac.

recursive• 13 years ago

Wow, they've made almost a penny off me.

thomasd• 13 years ago

Hmm, the huge difference between US and <>US are mostly self-imposed I think. Self-serve ads are only available for businesses or individuals in US.

Outside of US, to even participate in ad-buys, you'll have to seek out Twitter's agency partners (not transparent, therefore, not obvious who they are), and when you find them, you'll have to commit to a minimum of $10,000 spend over a period of 3 months, which is highly prohibitive. I understand why they're doing this, but that's for another post.

What this means to the difference in revenue per 1000 timeline views is the kind of audience businesses are likely to target. If you are buying ads in the US, you'll most likely buy ads to target people living in US and if you're living outside of US, your target audience will likely be outside of US.

Since self-serve ads are fully accessible in US to anyone, the amount of money spent is obviously a couple of magnitude larger. That means higher competition (read:bidding) and higher revenue, and therefore revenue per 1000 timeline view to Twitter.

The US will still be more expensive than everywhere else even if everyone could purchase ads the same way, but the difference wouldn't be at such magnitude.

What Twitter Earns Each Time You Look at Your Feed

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