Twitter shows more ads than better ideas: Why it needs a better biz model

The last thing Twitter needs is to put more poorly targeted advertising in front of users and clients

Twitter is showing its users more ads. That’s a clumsy approach to boosting advertising revenue in an age of sophisticated micro-targeting, and it shows the weakness of Twitter’s business model.

The problem is that Twitter fosters fleeting engagements with its users. Sure, people like to flip quickly through 280-character fragments of #thin content.

But that isn’t necessarily good for advertisers who want to hook users and draw them off-platform. Moreover, unlike the ad behemoths Google and Facebook, Twitter doesn't learn much about its users as they interact with the site.

Like every Internet platform, Twitter knows more about us than we might think.