Twitter Flexes Media Muscles

Twitter is the latest to run afoul of Silicon Valley by becoming, in essence, a media company. Twitter is fully in the advertising business. It’s how the company plans to support a huge communications infrastructure — with big brand dollars. Big brands like predictability. They don’t like utopian visions of open APIs and streams and ads that are run everywhere, in God knows what environments. That means Twitter the media company needs to control the experience, Valley beliefs in open platforms aside. That’s rankled some feathers, as The Verge notes.

[Twitter] doesn’t want to deal with fragmentation across different services, where it would have to work with API partners to ensure advertising and rich media was being properly displayed. This would become increasingly challenging, as sources familiar with Twitter’s plans say that it’s hoping to bring a number of new services into the Twitter stream, everything from booking a restaurant reservation to purchasing an item to playing a game.

That’s probably good news for mainstream Twitter users, but it’s bad news for the developers that bet their businesses on a privately owned platform. Read the full article at The Verge.

https://digiday.com/?p=16886

More in Media

How The New York Times is using visuals to boost podcast discovery and grow listenership

To grow podcast listenership and help people discover new shows, The New York Times is experimenting with visuals on platforms like YouTube and its own audio app this year.

Media Briefing: Publishers search for new ways to grow (and authenticate) audiences, overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit

“[Advertisers] already pay data providers for data. So why not pay the publisher?”

Research Briefing: Publishers’ revenue sources are top of mind at Digiday Publishing Summit

In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine which revenue streams were top of mind for publishers at the Digiday Publishing Summit, how TikTok is getting even more marketing spend from brands and retailers despite facing a potential U.S. ban, and how Disney is rolling out DRAX Direct, a direct integration with the industry’s largest DSPs, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.