Twitter is offering a new way for advertisers to deliver their marketing pitches to the people who are most likely to buy their products and services.
The targeting tool introduced Thursday allows ads to be sorted into different categories of interest. Once an ad has been tagged under a specific topic, such as “dogs” or “animation,” it could crop up among the tweets of users whose activity has indicated an interest in those topics.
Twitter also is allowing the ads known as “promoted tweets” to be tied to specific accounts that may have followers likely to have an interest in the subject of a marketing message.
The effort to sell more ads is part of Twitter’s ongoing bid to capitalize on the popularity of its short-messaging service.
After it was founded in San Francisco in 2006, Twitter initially focused on making its free service as useful as possible to lure more people into sharing their thoughts and moments of their lives in blurbs limited to 140 characters.
Having established itself as one of the world’s most important communications tools, Twitter has spent the past two years courting advertisers to prove it can also be a successful business.
Twitter hasn’t disclosed how well it has been doing because it remains a privately held business. But the research firm eMarketer estimates Twitter will generate about $260 million this year. That’s well below other advertising-dependent Internet companies such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Facebook Inc. Google’s revenue this year is expected to approach $50 billion, while Yahoo and Facebook are expected to bring in about $5 billion apiece.
Like Twitter is doing now, Google, Yahoo and Facebook all collect data about their users’ interests in an effort to show them ads catering to their interests and preferences.
As it mixes more marketing message into the flow of people’s tweets, Twitter’s annual revenue is expected to more than double to $540 million in 2014, according to eMarketer.
Supreme Court Allows Multibillion-Dollar Class Action Lawsuit To Proceed Against Meta
The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors' lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.
The justices heard arguments in November in Meta's bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.
The high court dismissed the company's appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.
Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump 's first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company's shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court's action. "The plaintiff's claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court," Stone said in an emailed statement.
Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users.
Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia.... Read More