TWITTER HAS UNVEILED its latest attempt to turn its massively popular microblogging service into a viable, long-term business – promoted hashtags.
The new offerings will see custom-designed pages showcasing content uploaded to the site from high-profile users.
The first such hashtag is #NASCAR, where visitors to twitter.com/#nascar are shown tweets posted by drivers and teams from the stock car racing circuit, which is second only to NFL in terms of TV audiences in the United States.
The set-up is similar to the one Twitter had in place for the FIFA World Cup in 2010, when visitors were shown live tweets featuring the ‘hashflags’ of the participating countries alongside the live scores from matches as they took place.
Twitter already raises cash through sponsored trends, where companies pay $120,000 to put their desired term at the top of the site’s trending topics for 24 hours, and the promoted hashtag is an elaboration on this theme.
Though the site is worth over $8 billion – with its value on private equity markets taking a hit as a result of Facebook’s disastrous flotation – it earned only around $140 million in revenue last year.
The new venture has been featured in the company’s first series of TV ads. You can watch all of them below.
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