This week Twitter announced that it wants to monetize the content it provides publishers in its embedded Twitter feeds. Lots of digital properties–apps and websites–show a real-time feed of their Twitter accounts right on their pages. Twitter makes this easy, with simple embed code that displays Twitter-generated content and gives it a reach beyond the domain of Twitter itself. As a result you don’t have to be a Twitter user to see a tweet–or to see thousands of them.
Embedding the Twitter feed in pages was initially a great way for Twitter to gain exposure to new audiences. And publishers were delighted with real-time activity of Twitter feeds, which keep their pages fresh. For publishers the Twitter feed was just one more content stream to monetize through advertising. Twitter’s announcement this week–that it will show its own ads in those feeds–is an effort monetize its publishers’ audiences. To keep publishers happy, Twitter will likely propose sharing the revenue.