The Associated Press, one of America’s most venerable news
organizations, is selling out its Twitter feed for the very first time.
And we can thank Samsung and CES for it. According to the AP, Samsung
will be the first company to pay for Sponsored tweets inside their
Twitter account, which currently boasts a little over 1.5 million
followers.
The ads (sponsored tweets, or as the AP is referring to them,
“innovative advertising”) will pop up twice a day during CES, which is
currently underway in Las Vegas. Each sponsored tweet from Samsung will
be clearly labeled as a “sponsored tweet” and produced by “staff outside
the AP newsroom.”
And before you ask about this decision and how it could compromise
the integrity of the AP as a credible news organization, don’t bother.
It doesn’t,
says the AP:
“The AP developed internal guidelines in recent months so that it may
build new business models in the new media landscape without
compromising its newsroom values and principles,” said the organization
in a statement.
“We are thrilled to be taking this next step in social media,” said
Lou Ferrara, the AP managing editor overseeing the newsroom social media
efforts. “As an industry, we must be looking for new ways to develop
revenues while providing good experiences for advertisers and consumers.
At the same time, advertisers and audiences expect AP to do that
without compromising its core mission of breaking news.”
The AP has to make money, and they haven’t been over the past couple
of years. Hosting sponsored tweets inside your stream is nothing new
around Twitter, but it is something new for the AP, who hasn’t always had the most genial relationship with the internet and social media.
As John Herman at BuzzFeed points out,
the AP and Samsung have struck their own agreement with these sponsored
tweets. That means that they are bypassing Twitter’s own Sponsored
Tweets product, which allows businesses to pay Twitter to features their
tweets, accounts, and hashtags.
Twitter
has this to say about such third-party arrangements:
There are so many ways that people use Twitter to
discuss the products they care about. In cases where these Tweets are
paid or otherwise sponsored, any payment arrangements are the
responsibility of the user and the sponsoring brand or service. These
“sponsored” Tweets are not prohibited, provided they clearly disclose
the nature of the sponsorship on Twitter, and do not otherwise violate
the Twitter Rules.
However, sponsorship as a form of automated or mass-created
affiliate advertising is not permitted on Twitter. This behavior is
considered spam, and creates a misleading and potentially unsafe user
experience. The guidelines in this article prohibit affiliate spam on
Twitter, and provide guidance for users interested in included sponsored
Tweets in their timeline.
So as long as the AP is hand-posting these sponsored tweets and not
spamming the hell out of everyone, they’re well within the law of
Twitter. But that doesn’t mean Twitter has to be happy about major
account skirting their own product and making backdoor deals.
