Twitter to test placing ads in replies, seeks to double annual revenue by 2023

This seems like a bad idea

Twitter's Revenue Product Lead Bruce Falck tweeted that the company was testing a new way to place ads - right into replies of an ongoing thread.

Starting today, we’re trying something different and testing a new ad format in Tweet conversations. If you’re a part of this test (which is global; on iOS & Android only), you’ll see ads after the first, third or eighth reply under a Tweet. pic.twitter.com/kvIGeYt2vp

— bruce.falck() (@boo) October 13, 2021

Twitter commonly places ads on a user's activity feed and the company reported some impressive earnings last year through ads. The problem is that they are still way behind other social media platforms like Facebook, which rake in billions through ads. This move partially seems to stem from a promise made by CEO Jack Dorsey in a recent earnings call.

The company wants to double its annual revenue by 2023 and wants to have at least 315 million monetisable daily active users by that time. For a company that has struggled to grow its active user base, that is a tall order.

Twitter also views India as a potential growth market and actually saw a surge of users in Q4 of 2020, when active users in India went up by 74 percent.

"In order to achieve our ambitions, we need to grow Twitter in developing markets where there are millions of potential customers, but where we have very nascent adoption today," Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour had said during the call.

"Regions like India and Africa are great examples, where we see promising growth rates," Beykpour added.