Micro-blogging social network Twitter has become the latest online company to introduce targeted advertising on its platform.
In a blog post, Twitter's senior director of product and revenue, Kevin Weil, explains that local companies looking to advertise their promotions on Twitter can share scrambled, unreadable e-mail addresses from people who engage with the said company online. "We can then match that information to accounts in order to show them a Promoted Tweet with the [promotion]."
Twitter's new targeted ad feature follows in the footsteps of Facebook, Google, Amazon and other major Web sites. The targeted ads are based on information that is collected in a file on the user's PC and contains the various Web sites they visit frequently, as well as the location of the logins.
Twitter, which is valued at almost $10 billion by investors, celebrated its seventh birthday this year, with 1.2 billion accounts and 200 million active users.
Since its birth, on 21 March 2006, Twitter rapidly became one of the most popular forms of social media, and could be nesting a healthy $950 million in ad revenue by next year, according to forecasts.
Twitter has also thrown more weight behind its advertising capabilities as it heads towards a highly-anticipated initial public offering expected next year.
Privacy concern
Twitter's move toward targeted advertising comes amid serious concern about Web sites using collected data from users for advertising purposes.
Both the US and Europe have investigated the techniques used by the likes of Google and Facebook to track users' online habits. Last year, authorities in Europe started requesting Web sites to inform users that cookies were being stored on their PCs.
Weil reiterates in the blog that Twitter doesn't make use of cookies. "This is how most other companies handle this practice, and we don't give advertisers any additional user information."
He further adds that users need not fear that targeted ads will infringe on their privacy. "While we want to make our ads more useful, we also want to give users simple and meaningful privacy options.
"Simply uncheck the box next to promoted content in account settings, and Twitter will not match your account to information shared by our ad partners for tailoring ads. This is the only place you'll need to disable this feature on Twitter," he explains.
Weil further states that Twitter supports do not track (DNT). "Twitter will not receive browser-related information from our ad partners for tailoring ads if users have DNT enabled in their browser."
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