Micro messaging site Twitter has announced it will now stop all third-parties from inserting paid tweets into Twitter timelines via the company’s API.
A blog post from the firm said: “It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem.
“For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”
The move is an attempt by Twitter to gain greater control over advertising revenues and increase the use of its “promoted tweets” feature that was announced last month.
Under this model, companies will be able to buy “promoted tweets” which will appear on the site’s search results pages, with only one such tweet being shown at any one time.
Which third party businesses will be affected by the change in the rules, and as The Guardian states, “quite how Twitter is going to identify them is going to be interesting to watch”.
A more in-depth explanation of exactly what changes are taking place is due to be released shortly as part of an updated API Terms of Service.