Twitter’s new CEO says cash is on the way

Dick Costolo, the newly appointed chief executive of Twitter, believes Twitter’s revenue model mystery has been solved. This Costolo interview with Ad Age editor Abbey Klaassen took place at the Mixx advertising conference in the US a week before he became CEO. “We feel like we’ve cracked the code on a new kind of advertising,” he said, referring to promoted tweets. Advertisers only pay Twitter for each ‘engagement’ i.e. each click, retweet or reply of each promoted tweet. About 40 big advertisers to date have used Twitter’s promoted tweets. Some, like Coke, enjoyed success. Others, like Pepsi, have yet to be convinced. Twitter is also looking to launch a ‘self serve’ platform for smaller, local advertisers. How users of Twitter will react to the new ad platforms remains to be seen. Costolo is confident it won’t be an issue due to the ‘organic content’ nature of the service i.e. people shouldn’t encounter promotions that aren’t relevant to them or their interests.