As you know, ads are an important aspect of any social network since they need the money to maintain the site and pay their employees. How you place ads on your platform will determine the level of engagement on your platform. Twitter has been placing ads through promoted trends, promoted tweets and now a new format called First View so you cant escape them no matter how.
Two weeks ago, it was reported that Twitter was not showing ads to “VIPs” due to the fact that they generate quite the engagement traffic on the platform. One of the biggest reasons why people join Twitter is to keep up with their favourite celebrities and this was highlighted with their latest revamp on their homepage. It made sense that they will not show ads to these prominent users so that they can find the experience worthwhile and pull in more active users, which was a win win case in my book.
However, it seems like Twitter decided to show ads to these prominent users after all. According to Recode, they have seen tweets of prominent users seeing ads on their timelines. This is actually happening on the day when Twitter is to announce its Q4 earnings. For a company that relies on ad placement as their primary source of revenue, it would also make sense to make the experience to all users.
However, VIP users on Twitter still get to use features that are not available to all users like the 3 new apps announced recently and they will still have an upper hand in this aspect.
