Twitter, the social network where users post about 50 million short messages a day, is to start running advertising on its platform as it seeks new sources of revenue.
Twitter, founded in 2006, will carry "promoted tweets" from today from advertisers including Best Buy, Virgin America and Starbucks, the company's co-founder Biz Stone said on a blog on its site.
The advertisements will shown to two to 10 per cent of users via the search page, before Twitter rolls them out within the whole site.
"Stubborn insistence on a slow and thoughtful approach to monetization - one which puts users first, amplifies existing value, and generates profit - has frustrated some Twitter watchers," Mr Stone said on the blog.
Promoted Tweets are ordinary tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to a wider group of users, company spokesperson Sean Garrett said.
"Users will start to see tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages," he added.
The advertisements will be shown as ordinary tweets, the company said. More advertisers will be able to post tweets in the future. If users don't interact with the advertisement, then it will disappear
Twitter, a privately held company, does not report earnings, but its website says: "While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make."
The San Francisco-based social networking service only began focusing on revenue last year. It struck distribution deals for about $25 million with Microsoft and Google, enough to make Twitter profitable in 2009, people familiar with the situation said in December.
Ali Rowghani was named as its first chief financial officer in February.
"Twitter has great potential as a marketing and advertising channel with opportunities to create viral buzz around a product or service," said Eden Zoller, analyst at technology research firm Ovum. "The flip side of Twitter's immediacy is that if advertising messages are not very carefully positioned users can hit back at brands and in real time, and brands will have little control over this."
Agencies