Twitter will reportedly launch an advertising platform in about a month, according to comments made by Seth Goldstein, the CEO of social media ad network SocialMedia.com.
Goldstein's comments came during a panel discussing Twitter's strategy at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting on Monday. Following the panel, Anamitra Banerji, Twitter's head of product management and monetization, said that Twitter was indeed working on an ad platform, but it was still in the test phase, MediaPost reports.
Banerji did not offer many details about Twitter's imminent advertising model, but he did say that the company will make it "explicitly clear" that someone paid for the ad, and all ads will be "relevant and useful, so the user doesn't think of it as an ad."
Some third-party marketers currently pay Twitter users for sponsored tweets, and many users choose to use the "#ad" hashtag to indicate these paid tweets. Banerji said hashtags were a workaround for now, but Twitter engineers have a better idea of what will work for the platform. Twitter has little control over ads or how tweets are viewed and consumed right now, but the platform's key mission is to prevent negative ads from appearing and harming Twitter in the long term, he said.
