Tech Tuesday: More Twitter ads likely after it goes public with IPO
By ROBERT EVATT World Staff Writer on Sep 17, 2013, at 2:26 AM Updated on 9/17/13 at 6:48 AM
The Twitter Inc. logo and homepage are displayed on computer monitors. Twitter Inc.'s market debut will be the most anticipated initial public offering since Facebook Inc. listed last year. ANDREW HARRER / Bloomberg
Tech
Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.
In the smartphone world, Android has been a smashing success. It's evolved into a strong and easy-to-use experience, and it's the platform of choice for most of the top-selling devices out there.
Brace yourself for more changes in the Twitter experience.
That's the main takeaway I'm getting from the social network's announcement that it will become a public company through a confidential IPO.
Yes, there's almost zero information in that announcement. Nothing about the company's finances, no list of its backers, no plans for moving forward. All the information we got fit into a 140-character tweet.
The only fact we can mine out of the announcement is that Twitter wants to be a public company. That means there will be stockholders it'll have to please. And that means Twitter will have to find ways to push up its revenue. Which means, most likely, more ads.
Just look at Facebook. Ever since its initial public offering in May 2012, the company has been instituting measure after measure designed to bring in more money. Sure, not all of them have worked - here I'm thinking of Facebook Home and the requests that people give out literal "like" cookies.
But many others apparently have. More ads have crept into the news feed, and the mobile application now supports ads. Just last week Facebook increased the size of ad images, and the company is starting to roll out video ads that start playing automatically.
We may gripe about the ads, but Facebook's user base continues to grow; it reached 1.11 billion monthly users in May. More importantly, Facebook's effort to please stockholders is working. Even though the stock's error-ridden launch caused the price to fall well below its $38 start, shares of Facebook have risen. Monday on the Nasdaq stock market, the stock fell $1.80, or 4 percent, to finish at $42.51.
History will most likely repeat itself with Twitter, especially because it has rolled out increasing numbers of ads in both feeds and suggestions of accounts to follow, as well as instituted tighter restrictions on third-party browsers. And that's before the revenue pressures of an IPO.
Twitter today is a firmly established success, so it'll take an epic mistake for ads to change that. We may as well get used to changes that aren't made with the consumer in mind.
Original Print Headline: More Twitter ads likely after IPO
Tech
Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.
In the smartphone world, Android has been a smashing success. It's evolved into a strong and easy-to-use experience, and it's the platform of choice for most of the top-selling devices out there.
