Twitter is a free service and they make their money mainly through advertising. It is, therefore, no surprise that they decided to make this next move.
Yesterday, Twitter users got pop up notifications that informed them of a recent policy change by Twitter. The company decided to change its data sharing settings and it is all about that sweet advertiser money.
Twitter decided to remove a privacy feature which allowed people to stop sharing some information with advertisers.
“The control you have over what information Twitter shares with its business partners has changed. Specifically your ability to control mobile app advertising measurements has been removed, but you can control whether to share some non-public data to improve Twitter’s marketing activities on other sites and apps. These changes, which help Twitter to continue operating as a free service, are now in your settings.”
The setting prevented Twitter from sharing information like ads you saw and tracking identifier for your phone. From now on, such information will be shared by default. However, Twitter users in the European Union, EFTA states or the United Kingdom are exempt from this, unless they decide to opt-in.
This change will allow Twitter to show advertisers how effective their ads are on the service. Advertising is still the most important revenue stream for Twitter and growing it would impact its revenue potential
This change also comes at a time when Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO and Founder, said that he would be transferring some of his wealth on a charity to fight the coronavirus. Last year, Twitter also claimed that their ad product had issues which led to advertisers not willing to pay as much for ads, which is not a good thing for them.
