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Twitter Will Show Who Pays for Ads and How Much They Spend
- ythn 8y agoWon't this just lead to "laundering" platforms like what happened with Whois?
- nichochar 8y agoyes. Added friction is still typically good in an adversarial problem like this one. This won't fix the problem forever but will weed out certain actors due to extra effort. In other words, it's a step in the right direction, good for twitter.
- banku_brougham 8y agoyes good for twitter, it is a positive change. not sufficient by a country mile, like it or not there will have to be some legislative remedies if we are to avoid dire consequences.
- avree 8y agoNot necessarily. Twitter has the power to deny anyone they want from purchasing ads from them. WHOIS is not centrally controlled in the same way. Twitter could easily block "laundering" platforms from functioning simply by not allowing them to purchase advertisements.
- notatoad 8y agoThe laundering will work the opposite way. Instead of hiding behind one big entity, political advertiser's will hide behind a multitude of smaller entities to make themselves look like grassroots organizations. You won't see "promoted by [Koch|Soros], who spent $8.5m on ads this year", you'll see things promoted by "milualkee citizens for freedom, who spent $1500 this year". But the money will be coming from the same place. If you give advertisers more space, they'll figure out a way to use it effectively. Even if the point of that space was to try and keep them honest.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoRight, but those groups also have to disclose their donors.
- supertrope 8y agoThis ad was purchased by Americans for America.
- minikites 8y agoAt least that's something you can research, unlike now where you have no information.
- CodeCube 8y agoI want to be optimistic about this ... but it's not like people particular care who is feeding them this stuff. They will complain about shadow government fake news in one breath, while at the same time sharing loads of drivel from `UberPatriotEagleGuns News`, or to be fair, `SocialistOther96PercentDemocratHose`
- minikites 8y agoI agree that people don't care (broadly speaking) but people who do care still have a chance (my original point) and perhaps more importantly, journalists can investigate and publish articles that can be read by the middle segment of people who care enough to read the news but don't care enough to investigate themselves.
- duxup 8y ago"This add paid for by Real Americans, No really! We're Real!"
- txsh 8y agoThis only applies to overt ads which are hardly the problem. It does nothing to mitigate the armies of astroturfers influencing public opinion.
- larkeith 8y agoStill, it's certainly a welcome change, and a step in the right direction. I wonder what the best way to combat large-scale astroturfing on a platform like twitter would be; My first thought would be a rep system akin to those of StackOverflow or HN, but I'm not sure how you would implement it such that there's not a large impact on legitimate new users - there's no system like upvotes Twitter could use to stratify.
- geofft 8y agoI believe Reddit does have a problem with advertisers purchasing (or renting) accounts from established users who have enough karma/longevity to post in the various subreddits that block new users to avoid spam.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoI think that is still an ongoing problem but you can use reddit sort of like a company forum where you don't have to pay reddit a dime by having a community manager and learning the platform.
- isostatic 8y ago> where you don't have to pay reddit a dime So you, and your company's data, are the product that reddit monetizes.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago> I wonder what the best way to combat large-scale astroturfing on a platform like twitter would be Report them to the FTC because paid endorsements/reviews/etc are subject to disclosure [1]. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#ftcactapply https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoThis is going to give away a huge competitive advantage for good marketers. If I know my political ads are most effective with Women, 45-65, who are Hispanic, and that's where I'm focusing my spend.... Is it fair for the opponent to have that information? If they give that level of detail for political ads, I hope they at least spare startup businesses who are still researching to find their ideal audience.
- cm2012 8y agoFB is also doing the same thing, starting today. Brutal.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> Is it fair for the opponent to have that information? I'm parsing "fair" in the form of: imagine two societies, one where such information is private the other where it's public. Who outperforms? Would the number of start-ups which cave because an incumbent snipes their marketing outweigh the number who could piggyback on an incumbent's revealed slicing? (The latter, by marketing to the same customers better or noticing who is being left out.) Will consumers see more advertising or less? If more, will they respond to the deluge by defaulting to the incumbent or trying new options more frequently? I don't know. But we have an opportunity to find out. If this drives innovation, I'd say a case is to be made to open up these data across advertising platforms. Who knows. Maybe it's the tool to pry apart Facebook and Google's stranglehold.
- rock_hard 8y agoYou realize though that at least a Facebook has the same features, right? In fact FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS in a pages ad history and not just 7 days like Twitter does
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS in a pages ad history I am not completely familiar with Facebook's ad platform. Does it really let anyone see, for example, which demographics Procter & Gamble is targeting with a particular Gilette ad? (Or its Gilette brand, generally?)
- largehotcoffee 8y agoThe amount of blatant paid advertising going unmarked in Twitter Moments is ridiculous.
- dvtrn 8y agoI assumed they were all paid for to begin with honestly.
- dmead 8y agoI never used my twitter account because it was obviously all branding and marketing in a public facing way in the 2000s.
- kevinyun 8y agoIs this factual truth that advertisers can pay to be on the front page Moments? If so I am surprised, and would have expected at a minimum Sponsored disclosure like they do with paid tweets
- trophycase 8y agoThis is an awesome step in the right direction.
- maym86 8y agoThis is smart. It can help move the responsibility away from Twitter's issues with policing it's own platform and onto the people paying for the advertising. Without transparency the blame stops at the platform. With this people can scrutinize the actual content and sources of the content.
- stevehawk 8y agoThis is possibly a bad move business wise as it possibly exposes business intelligence information that a company may not want competitors to have.
- koolba 8y agoI thought that as well but closer reading of the article indicates it’s specifically for political advertisements, not generic ad spend by corporations.
- master-litty 8y agoSo this is only applies to political advertisements? The title is misleading and should be changed.
- stevehawk 8y agoNo the article says its for all advertising accounts but political one in particular they will divulge more information than just budget.
- apoorv20 8y agoIt seems that we will be able to see all the ads related to an advertiser account. [1] [1] https://ads.twitter.com/transparency https://ads.twitter.com/transparency
- deleted 8y ago
- martin1975 8y agoI dislike both Twitter & Facebook, and am on the verge of closing both accounts, however I give them kudos for this - increasing transparency instead of censorship. While I understand our desire and pursuit for truth, I would like to leave the interpretation of any ultimate truths and meaning to rest with the end user, and not with any corporation or even government.
- obelix_ 8y agoYup good move. TV news orgs need to do this too. Next too all their flashing banners and scrolls. Especially when the talking heads of both side are raging. I'd really like to know if Coke or Apple or whoever is footing the bill.
- copperred 8y agoThey can increase both transparency and censorship at the same time.
- akerro 8y agoThis is about financial transparency, nothing blocks them from increasing censorship and shadow-banning accounts and advertisers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- alphabettsy 8y agoThumbs up from me! This is the kind of transparency I like to see when it comes to politics.
- Pinkertron 8y agoThis is going to make blocking promoted tweets even more fun than it already is.
- amelius 8y agoYou mean easier, yes.
- Pinkertron 8y agoI block everything promoted and it never stops feeling good.
- avivo 8y agoThis and Facebook's equivalent are great. But what about Google/YouTube...?
- Aissen 8y agoConsidering that right now Twitter has a link to give you the reason you're seeing an ad, that almost always doesn't give the answer. Are they afraid to show what they've deducted of my profile directly ? I don't care how much an advertiser spend, but I want to know who they wanted to target, or at least what they decided to target that led Twitter to show me the ad. We're not there yet.
- isostatic 8y agoI'd love to see a "how much did you loading this page make the site owner" Perhaps a "with adblocker" and "without adblocker" The average facebook account nets them something like $2 a month in the US, or under a dollar a month in europe, that's a tiny amount. When people realise how little their personal data and time is being sold for, perhaps there will be more of a backlash against advertising.
- pjc50 8y agoAnother interesting metric would be "did the owner make more from this page than you spent in mobile data to retrieve its ads"..
- Aissen 8y agoI think Facebook's monthly ARPU is closer to $7 in the US in 2017, which is absurdly high (vs the rest of the world). Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
- isostatic 8y agoAhh yes, the figures I saw were the same $26, but implied it was yearly rather than quarterly. I wonder why USians are so much more valuable to advertisers than Europeans.
- ddorian43 8y agoI guess US people have bigger wages + have more of a credit-card culture.
- AngryData 8y agoProbably because (and this is personal opinion, not researched facts) the US is in a huge advertising bubble. We have found out just how effective advertising is at selling products and we have numbers to back it up so and decent sized business is throwing money to advertisers like mad to drive sales. If sales start to drop though, they double down and throw more money for more advertising; but what they top level administrators aren't considering is the non-linear nature of advertising and exposure and eventually advertisee fatigue enough. By time the sales numbers come back for your second or third round you already paid for the advertising and just burned through tons of your initial profits for minor gains. At the end of it all though you likely still have positive overall numbers from advertising, they don't show how badly advertising performed per cost near the end because the big initial exposure brings up the average. Rinse and repeat! Also, there aren't much of any protections for consumers against false and deceptive advertising unless you have a million dollar legal team to take on the business's multi-million dollar legal team.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI wonder how much of their business is political advertising, if it was small enough I'd be inclined to ban it all and save a lot of hassle.
- jelevoir 8y agoI would imagine quite a bit these days, considering in 2014 they released this handbook: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/the-all-new-twitter-government-and-elections-handbook.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/the-all-new-t...
- AndrewDucker 8y agoWhat I'd like is a "Twitter made $x from you in the last year through showing you ads. Click here to pay us $2x and not see any for the next year."
- drham 8y agoAmong many other reasons referenced by others, the users who would be willing to fork over a subscription fee to access twitter are exactly the demographic that twitter needs in order to keep its advertising attractive to marketers. A successful subscription option for a service like twitter would greatly diminish the value of their advertising inventory.
- newjobhelp 8y agoCouldn't that get awfully expensive for people with lots of followers?
- amelius 8y agoPerhaps people with lots of followers should be able to make money on Twitter, just like people with lots of views make money on YouTube.
- benreesman 8y ago“I’m rich relative to the mean Twitter audience, please ruin your business model for something that is privilege at best and crypto-HN virtue signaling at worst.” It’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to measure the caliber of Twitter’s finance quants, but last I knew it was pretty fucking hard to get past the phone screen for that job. I enjoyed jousting with them.
- wpietri 8y agoOh, please. Twitter's average revenue per user is something like $2-3 per quarter. Your notion that you have to be some kind of Scrooge McDuck to spend $25/year on a Twitter Premium subscription is ridiculous. Jamming "virtue signaling" into places where it doesn't fit is its own kind of virtue signaling.
- moomin 8y agoUnless they’re publishing KYC data, I call bullshit.
- at-fates-hands 8y agoThe funny part about this is when I do see ads from companies like Apple, Google, or other news sources, the comments thread is like pure gold.
- tommywiseausmom 8y agoYes, this should be a requirement for all ad platforms.
- bobbygoodlatte 8y agoI hope this sounds the alarm on how shockingly cheap it is to promote political extremism on these platforms. Donald Trump saw much cheaper effective ad rates than Clinton on social media by crafting viral outrage memes as ads. It will be interesting to look at the effective CPM rates of various candidates on Twitter using this data. I'm hoping they don't just show how many people were shown the Tweet as an ad, but also those who saw it from organic distribution via retweet. I think you'll find that outrageous, incendiary politicians pay a lot less per view than reasonable ones.