The easy and effective way to monetize Twitter

I have been talking about Twitter and other micro-blogging services for a couple years now – the discussion of Twitter monetization has gone for almost as long.  The buzz  Twitter gets is always at a fevered pitch but recently it has been even higher with the “talks” of a Google acquisition. With all the hype and hoopla going around a few interesting discussions have been taking place about what a Twitter brought to you by Google would look like. Outside of integrating GMail, Google Docs, Picasa and other Google services the real interesting potential would be adding AdWords Contextual targeting.

Personally I would hope that either Twitter itself or whomever bought it would not ruin the user-experience by placing ads on either the profile pages or tweet streams. However, what about Twitter search? Think about it for a second – advertisers could target real-time conversations through the existing AdWords (or similar) platform. Check out my mock-up below: people are tweeting about SXSW in Texas…ads for Texas travel deals show up on the side. Sounds like a home run to me…plus Twitter doesn’t need to be bought by Google to do this – a nice rev-share agreement would do just fine.

Tagged as: Google, Twitter