Twitter takes a shot at revenue

Every day there are roughly 50 million tweets zipping through cyberspace. Until today, none of them were paid ads.

Twitter, which recently celebrated its fourth birthday, began testing its fledgling advertising model on a sliver of Promoted Tweets (between 2 and 10 percent), and is monitoring closely how the Twitterverse reacts. Among the early paid sponsors are Starbucks Corp., Best Buy and Virgin America. The ads appear as the first result when doing a search on Twitter.com. I tried several combinations of searches to find an ad, but could only get this Starbucks ad when I searched for "coffee."

Clicking on the link in the ad (http://yfrog.com/2gbb6xj) took me to a photo of a sea of clear glasses and blue trays holding a fair amount of coffee beans. There's a person in the background, but the head is cut off. Not exactly a Pulitzer Prize winner, but a real  glimpse of the cupping room at Starbucks.

For more on the Twitter entry into paid tweets, see this story (http://bit.ly/8YKy3o) on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site.

Look for more ads in Twitter feeds in the days and weeks ahead. I'm curious to hear your reaction to them, and invite comments on this blog post or as tweets directed to me @algibes.