Updates: Adventures in Great Reporting: Twitter Now has Ads – or does it?
Update: Just got this email from Biz Stone:
Hi Frederic,
No, we’re not putting ads on Twitter.com. From what I gather, someone mistook a background image for advertising.
Thanks,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.
The TechCrunch story, of course, stands uncorrected – so do all the me-too posts.
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Duncan Riley reports on TechCrunch that somebody might have seen ads on Twitter today:
Twitter was down tonight, nothing really unusual for the San Francisco based startup (to be fair though downtime has improved since they dumped Joyent), but what was different is some reports of users spotting ads in their Twitter stream during the service difficulties. In John Johnston’s
case, he spotted an ad for the China Business Network at the top of his Twitter web timeline. There were no ads evident when I visited Twitter, which may indicate testing only in preparation for a broad-scale rollout.
Problem is – there is really no evidence for this. According to this commenter on the post, her background image was featured on Twitter and mistaken for an ad:
for the record, i’m innocent and did not break twitter tonight. turns out the URL to my background image for Twitter was featured randomly in a yellow box at the top of the timeline and got mistaken for an ad.
this is what was on that yellow box:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitte…..witter.jpg
here’s a screenshot taken by @flypig of that yellow box with the URL. i’m not sure if it’s clickable but it opens up to this image, which is the background of my twitter page.
very strange. had i known it was going to be picked at random or included randomly as part of a glitch…i would have re-designed a better background page! LOL.
To which Duncan Riley answers:
Christine
the second source didn’t see your image, but it is all a bit bizarre. Either way, ads are coming, just a matter of when.
Only – nobody has a screenshot – there is basically no evidence for this – but that doesn’t stop Riley from reporting on it, or correcting the article after the commenter pointed out the error.
I just send an email to the Twitter guys about this and asked them for some clarification and will update this post if I hear from them. M best guess for now: there are no ads on Twitter (for now).