AllThingsD:
Twitter is expanding its ad program to iPhone and Android handsets, as the company gets more aggressive about ramping up revenue. Twitter has already been showing some limited advertising on its mobile apps.
Just like the Promoted Tweets that Twitter shows on its primary Twitter.com site, these ads will show up in users’ “timelines.” At first Twitter will only allow advertisers to place the ads in front of users who already following their accounts. But within months it will expand the program to allow marketers to reach people who don’t follow them — just as it does on the Web.
oh that’s going to end well …
And thus the great paradox of social sites: nobody wants to pay to join a social site and nobody wants advertising either.
(As for me, I’d be willing to pay to be the customer instead of the product. Facebook made barely $4 per user last year; I’d pay $5/year to be on either of those services ad-free.)
The problem is what the users of the services have come to expect … Twitter users using the simplicity of a mobile client are going to be more “bothered” by ads than users of the Facebook website, where the ads are relatively small and out of the way
Re: expectations: EXACTLY! Maybe a lesson here is you better roll your business model out at same time as launch. Bolting it on later is problematic.