We Waited All this Time for...uh...Promoted Tweets?

So...in-stream advertising. That is the answer on how Twitter will make money. I gotta admit that I am pretty underwhelmed with this idea. While the number 1 question about Twitter has long been "when will Twitter make money?"...the # 2 question has to have been "how will Twitter make money?" 

And now we know the answer. Basically, Twitter will partner with corporations to stick "promoted tweets" at the top of Twitter searches. In effect, this will mean that a search will be "user-generated" content, but instead, pre-determined, paid-for content provided by big corporations. Not exactly rocket science if you ask me.

So...will the model work? Well, if Twitter gets paid and corporations are happy...probably so. After all, Tweets are by-definition self-promotion anyway...so how different is corporate promotion? Maybe we don't like the idea, but it isn't like Twitter has been pure and clean. Heck, I myself wrote recently about the "sponsored tweets" business with recent posts on leading Twitter advertisers like Be-A-Magpie and Sponsored Tweets.

That being said, do I think twitter could have done better? Well, yea. It isn't like search advertising hasn't been perfected by the likes of Google already. As Newsweek stated earlier this week in their aptly titled post "Is Twitter Trying to Be Unimaginative at Making Money?", it is not like this hasn't been done before. To quote Newseek:

Yesterday Twitter unveiled its fascinating and nontraditional business plan, and it is … drumroll please … search advertising. Upon this announcement, a heavy sigh emanated from the Internet. In Silicon Valley, where tradition falls under the boot heels of revolutionaries every five years or so, it’s hard to think of something more traditional than search advertising, which Google perfected nearly a decade ago.

So what does this all mean for Twitter? Maybe nothing...maybe everything. While it is clear that Twitter needs to find a way to make money, it does strike me as uninspired that Twitter has gone down this path. After all, for a "revolutionary" system like Twitter it seems like a revolutionary model is needed. Do you agree?