Twitter’s expanded promoted tweets program starts rollout today

Twitter has long planned an expansion of its promoted tweets program as part of its goal to generate profit.

Rolling out today, Twitter will add paid tweets to users’ timelines from companies they may not be following (before, paid tweets would only appear if you followed that company). Not everyone will see these tweets immediately. Right now, less than 10% of users will see them as the microblogging platform gradually expands this new ad system.

It may sound spammy to some, but rest assured: paid tweets will still try to target relevant users, not everyone—”A promoted tweet will appear in a user’s timeline only if the tweet is likely to be interesting and relevant to that user,” reads Twitter’s blog. “Our platform uses a variety of signals to determine which promoted tweets are relevant to users, including what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a tweet, what they retweet, and more.”

I’ve seen plenty of users complaining, but I must ask, why? Twitter is a company, you know, a business. That means it needs to make money or it will cease to exist. Ads are naturally the ideal revenue generator for its model. So, would you rather have flash popups eating data and slowing page load speeds? Paid tweets are reasonably subtle, easily ignorable, and a refreshing alternative to most online ads I come across these days. Let’s accept them and tweet on.