Is Twitter Rolling Out a New Ad System?

(MoneyWatch)  Federal law requires all bloggers to write about Twitter at least once a month, so here is my compliance-mandated offering for July: Twitter is testing a new revenue system that could involve selling targeted advertising.

TechCrunch has obtained a set of leaked documents from Twitter regarding its revenue forecasts. The company thinks it will generate a "$140 million revenue run rate" by 2010. But the blog is declining to reveal how Twitter will generate that money until its next post ...

... That post appears to be contingent in part on Twitter's lawyers, who are clearly attempting to dissuade the blog from revealing any more.

But Valleywag spotted New York Times journalist Saul Hansell testing a new Twitter ad system. Hansell tweeted:

My last tweet was testing a new ad system that looks at what you Tweet about (like movies or soft drinks). More on Bits soon

You can see Hansell's test posts here. There's no guarantee, of course, that the system he's testing is actually Twitter's. BNET has covered Twitter ad models produced by third parties before.

A targeted delivery system that serves ads based on Twitter users' content production and following makes sense. A lot more sense than Twitter's first revenue producing idea, a godawful reality TV show, "FinalTweet," in which "young entrepreneurs" race across America, tweeting, to win a cash prize.

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