To strengthen its presence in ad industry, Twitter finally rolls out the most rumored  self-serve ad option for its ad platform. Currently the new launched option is in test mode and available for some of the advertisers only. This new option will bring transparency in purchase as there is no need of third-party channel and advertisers can directly purchase Twitter ad inventory by using credit card or web browser. In present scenario only few of the ad products, like promoted accounts and promoted tweets, can be purchased directly from Twitter.
However, Twitter has said that with the expansion of self-serve ads platform more and more products will be added in future.
As with all of our advertising efforts, we’re starting small, testing carefully and making improvements as we learn what works. We will slowly roll this capability out to more advertisers in the coming weeks and months, as said by Matt Graves’s, Twitter PR rep , via e-mail.
Twitter has been talking about such initiative for long time. it has had a discussion with reporters who saw it on Twitter – a post on Media Post which states that Twitter is testing on self-serve ad option – in January, 2011.
This step is one of the most significant steps taken by Twitter since it will show the transparency and will also help in grabbing more number of customers. This will help Twitter to appreciate its valuation to $8 billion which will in-turn make the back-end process of managing orders and transaction more critical.
Social networking sites are enhancing their ad platform for more revenue which will help them in attracting more number of investors in future. Facebook’s IPO is expected by mid of 2012 and with tremendous market response to LinkedIn and GroupOn, Twitter may follow them soon.
Few days back, Google had also enhanced its ad platform by introducing several features and video advertisement. Now, Twitter’s such initiative is not a surprise as advertisers are the major source of revenue for social networking sites. Although,  Twitter’s revenue has been predicted to touch $400 million by 2013, recent launches indicate that Twitter will achieve this milestone by end of 2012 – definitely.
