One reason why StockTwits is growing: Those Twitter ads

May 22, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Twitter’s management seems to have mixed feelings about advertising. But here’s anecdotal evidence that those text ads it has been running lately are worth something.

StockTwits, a site for sharing stock-related tweets, saw a sharp uptick in users last month, around the same time that Twitter began running ads for it.

In March, StockTwits had nearly 50,000 users but grew to more than 210,000 in April, according to Compete. Around the same time that Twitter saw a sharp traffic spike. To be sure, StockTwits has been getting coverage in the financial press, and has spread through word-of-mouth on Twitter and the web, as cofounder Howard Lindzon explained to me today.

So, there are various reasons why StockTwits might be growing fast all of a sudden. But the combination of Twitter itself growing and the ads certainly correlate with StockTwits’ growth. (Note: The screenshot is of Twitpic, another service that uses Twitter, as I don’t see StockTwits showing up for me at the moment.)

Remember, Twitter isn’t charging for these text ads at this point — if you can even call them ads. In fact, as StockTwits cofounder Soren Macbeth told me in last month:

I saw that [text ad] box there with other Twitter apps and asked for StockTwits to be included. Next thing I know there is it was. That’s unfortunately all the information I have about. I can say that it is quite effective in driving traffic though.

At a conference last week, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the company isn’t especially interested in traditional advertising versus other ways of making money (something it hasn’t done at all yet). But then he published a company blog post clarifying that it’s not opposed to this form of revenue. Given how these text ads seem to be working for StockTwits and presumably the other featured companies, it might be time to start charging for them.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • I think Twitter's very smart to provide free ad links to partners. What separates Twitter today is that there's an ecosystem growing around them - clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck and apps like StockTwits. The more traffic they send to the members of their ecosystem, the more entrenched Twitter becomes in the user workflow. So, pushing the traffic out to partners helps Twitter increase usage while also raising the barrier to entry for others. Smart move.
    And, as you point out Eric, this lays the groundwork to make it easy to charge down the road if they want to.
  • atul
    Not only do these Twitter ads drive traffic, they also pass on a lot of Page Rank juice of the millions of Twitter user pages. It will be interesting to see how some of the sites performs once they are no longer the text ad(s) of the month. For example, traffic for exectweets and marchtweetness tanked after their initial twitter ad (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/exectweets.com/)
  • Thanks Eric -

    The Twitter ad drove tremendous signups for us which will definitely slow going forward, but our page views and traffic and time on site will again keep going up as aoption is very high.

    The subscribers and intital page views that twitter drove are much like Digg traffic. zip in, zip out. Thats of no interest to us but Twitter has def got something there with the ad box. the scarcity of ads probably made so many MORE people click on them
  • Eric,

    Nice blog post. Who did you email and ask for stocktwits to be included in the twitter ads? I want to have http://www.tweetphoto.com included in that list as we have has positive reviews in mashable and techcrunch

    Feel free to DM me. cheers!
  • I didn't email anyone at Twitter -- StockTwits did. They're the ones to ask about it.
  • I have the same question as Eric.

    Quoqu.com ( http://quoqu.com )is similar to stocktwits, but provides full market data, news, interactive charts and uplaod etc. It runs on it's own twitter-like system but also has the option of posting a member's trading status updates to twitter.