Breaking some news about itself, the AP announced today that it will be selling access to its popular — 1.5 million followers — Twitter feed. Samsung will be buying two tweets a day during the next week, synced up with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“As an industry, we must be looking for new ways to develop revenues while providing good experiences for advertisers and consumers,” AP managing editor Lou Ferrara said in a statement. “At the same time, advertisers and audiences expect AP to do that without compromising its core mission of breaking news.”

Appropriately enough, the AP broke the news about its new Twitter ad revenue on Twitter itself:

.@AP provides sponsored tweets during electronics show: bit.ly/Zxfugq #2013ces

—
AP CorpComm (@AP_CorpComm) January 07, 2013

Twitter offers Promoted tweets, which brands who publish on Twitter can purchase to increase their reach and follower count. Promoted Tweets don’t work like Facebook’s Promoted Posts, which are only shown to people who have already liked you, or, optionally, also to people who are friends of those who like your brand. Promoted tweets appear to everyone that their buyers target.

But Twitter offers no native capability for brands or people on Twitter to sell access to their tweet stream themselves — possibly missing out on a revenue opportunity. But a somewhat shady underworld of tweet-selling sites like Pay4Tweet, TwitPub, and Buy Sponsored Tweets has been around for some time.

Ad.ly has even made a business out of selling tweets to brands from celebrity accounts. Tweets from accounts like Kim Kardashian’s or Snoop Dogg’s run from $1,000 to $10,000 each.

The AP’s sponsored tweets don’t appear to run afoul of Twitter rules, which has banned selling tweets that are place programmatically. As long as paid tweets are posted manually and disclose the fact that they are sponsored, Twitter seems to be fine with the practice.

The question is, however, for how long?

Twitter needs revenue to justify its value, even with its massive user growth. This is a source of revenue which has spawned an almost black-market ecosystem in trading tweets for cash. Few Twitter users would complain about a rules change that forced sold tweets to be purchased via a Twitter-owned service, as few users would be impacted by the change. And by skimming 30 percent, perhaps, off the top, Twitter would invent a new revenue strategy.

In the meantime, the AP will be collecting some cash from Samsung for accessing an audience it has built on Twitter. And Twitter will get precisely zilch.

photo credit: screenpunk via photopin cc

“Promoted Tweets are entering a new phase,” the company said in a statement. “We’re expanding testing in the timeline with a small number of users.”

Here’s how the new ads work: Say you don’t follow Best Buy. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t see any tweets from the company. But if Best Buy pays for a certain kind of advertising on Twitter, you would see tweets from Best Buy when you log in.

The company is also working on more refined ad targeting, and Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo said Twitter already sees robust engagement around advertising content on the service. He said Virgin had its fifth largest sales day ever due to a Twitter campaign at a breakfast at the company’s headquarters last week.

Twitter confirmed that it is raising a large funding round from Russia’s DST, the investment company that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga. The round is rumored to be around $800 million across a two-part funding round, which would value the company at nearly $8 billion.

Twitter has more than 300 million registered users who post more than 200 million tweets a day. Valued at $3.7 billion after its most recent round of funding in December, 2010, Twitter makes $200 million each year, according to analysts cited in the report.

“Now we have an opportunity to expand Twitter’s reach with a significant round of funding led by the venture firm DST Global, with the participation of several of our existing investors,” the company said in a blog post.

There were reports earlier this month that the company was raising a $400 million round at a valuation of nearly $8 billion. A regulatory filing discovered by venture capital information firm VCExperts with the Delaware Secretary of State’s Division of Corporations indicated it could be a two-part round that would bring the company up to $800 million.

Twitter has more than 300 million registered users who publish more than 200 million tweets a day. Valued at $3.7 billion after its most recent round of funding in December, Twitter makes $200 million each year, according to analysts cited in the report.

While Twitter is incredibly popular, it has had some trouble finding effective ways to monetize the service. The company introduced “promoted tweets” last year in an effort to make money and it also runs promoted trending topics.