Spotted: Inline Advertising in TweetDeck Search Columns

Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it would begin showing inline ads on select third-party Twitter clients.

Today, those inline ads have been spotted on TweetDeck, a column-based Twitter client popular among power users.

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Unlike on HootSuite, the other third-party client now seeing ads, these advertisements are only showing up inline when a user searches for a promoted trend. In this case, that trend is “#w2s”, the hashtag for the Web 2.0 Summit happening in San Francisco this week.

When we first looked at these ads, we spoke with several people who predicted that they might be overlooked by the general population but that Twitter might experience some backlash from the techies and the social media purists. Today, we get to see what response these ads get when they show up on TweetDeck to people searching for news about the Web 2.0 Summit. The ads are targeting precisely those people that were said to potentially take issue with inline advertising.

Is it really that offensive to see inline advertising in this way? It’s like saying “This conference tracking column is brought to you by… the conference you’re attending.” But is it the fact that it only shows up in a search column that makes it feel non-intrusive? What if, like HootSuite, TweetDeck starts getting inline advertisements on non-search columns?

In fact, this article right here might be the largest to-do you’ll see about this today, but that’s part of Twitter’s strategy – roll out the ads and see how people react along the way. How will you react to inline advertising on TweetDeck’s search columns?

[Thanks for the tip, Alex.]

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