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Twitter

Twitter’s bid to monetise 500 million logged-off audiences highlights true tonic to growth ails – and it’s not recruiting new users

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By Seb Joseph, News editor

December 10, 2015 | 4 min read

Twitter is to start pushing ads to around 500 million people who visit the micro-blogging platform each month but who don’t have an account, signalling that its main priority for now is not whether it can get more people tweeting, but to cash in on the unregistered user.

More than a year after it admitted it needed to make money from its logged-off users, the social network’s plan has begun in earnest. Twitter has argued for years that its audience is far bigger than the 320 million who sign in each month and has routinely backed its ability to one day turn that into revenue in spite of Wall Street’s concerns over slowing user growth. Its latest test will try to make good on that promise.

How will Twitter go from selling an audience reach of 320 million to 820 million? Primarily, though running ads in tweets that appear in Google searches or when they are shared in a text or email. These ads will be targeted based on the context in which the person comes across a tweet, rather than the interest data used for logged-in users. For example, ads won’t target a person because they like Liverpool FC but they will appear in front of them should they search for “Liverpool FC’ on Google.

The first phase will serve Promoted Tweets to desktop only and will appear either on profile pages and those pages where you see a single tweet on the page. Initially, the aim of the ads will be to boost website clicks and conversions as well as video views.

A limited run in the UK, the US, Japan and Australia ahead of a wider rollout will test the waters for Twitter’s play to effectively pull in that new segment of logged-off users into the wider packages it sells to advertisers. It’s a proposition the business will be hoping kickstarts its business, which while benefiting from surging ad revenues has stuttered when it comes to actually growing its user base. And should it continue to struggle to recruit new users then at least it can supplant that with more – logged-out and non-registered users – in a given demographic an advertiser can target.

“By letting marketers scale their campaigns and tap into the total Twitter audience, they will be able to speak to more people in new places using the same targeting, ad creative, and measurement tools,” wrote Deepak Rao, revenue product manager.

It builds on a deal Twitter struck with Google earlier this year to include tweets in search results, thus paving the way for the social network to sell unregistered users to brands. Also, there’s Moments, Twitter’s curation feature that lets people follow tweets around TV shows, sports, news and other events, which some industry observers claim could help it monetise those logged-off users; their reasoning being that Moments allows brands to target people who have shown an interest in certain Moments – similar to how broadcasters sell their ad space – and thereby negating the need (somewhat) to have the same level of granular interest data they get from logged-in users.

Chief financial officer Anthony Noto has backed Twitter to monetise unregistered users at roughly half the rate of unregistered users. Buoyed the potential of Moments, its ability to sell ads n third-party apps through services like MoPub, Twitter’s plan to sell ads to unregistered users is starting to gain momentum and it’s just a matter of time before the ads start to appear in more places online.

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