SAN FRANCISCO — One month after unveiling its own advertising system, Twitter has banned other companies from inserting ads into users’ streams of short messages.
It is just the latest in a series of moves Twitter has made to gain greater control over the popular site. The move also illustrates the perils for companies that become too dependent on any one platform such as Twitter, which over time might decide to encroach on or poach their business.
Twitter recently released its own mobile applications in competition with many independent firms. It also has said it will explore developing its own applications for sharing pictures and videos. Some developers have expressed an uneasiness about Twitter’s moves.
In a blog post, Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costolo reasoned that advertising from other companies could put too great a burden on Twitter.
“Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests and scaling the service,” he wrote. “Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support e-mails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.”
Twitter has its own advertising system called Promoted Tweets. It shares about half of the revenue with developers.
California-based Ad.ly, which brokers ads and places them in users’ Twitter streams, denied it would be affected by the change. Ad.ly chief executive Arnie Gullov-Singh said, “Ad.ly supports Twitter’s movement today to create standards around in-stream advertising. Twitter’s changes are aimed at discouraging members of the ecosystem who do not maintain the proper balance of user experience and monetization and who are not invested in building long-term value on the platform. Since inception, Ad.ly has.”
