Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter's new ad model this week. The newly unveiled promoted tweets in search results ad model was shown by Twitter's CFO this week and clearly is a big step forward for the company. While, I have looked at it and I have not formulated a set in stone opinion on whether it will work or not but I do think it is only a small step towards fully monetizing the website.

Why do I say this?

First, the ads are only going to be displayed on a tiny fraction of the site, being seen by users who search via the web interface only. Twitter has not disclosed numbers on how many folks search but I have to figure its a tiny fraction and when you ad that small number by the number of users who generally click on ads you get an even smaller number. Do you see where I am headed with this? 

Second, Google was successful by matching desire with satisfaction. Meaning that people desired to find stuff on the web and Google provided satisfactory results to those queries. 

Folks don't go on Twitter to search. Their main intent is for quick snippets of information without searching or spending alot of time finding it. I would venture to say that the average Twitter user finds his connections through friends and via other means than searching on the UI. 

Let's hope these ads are relevant when landing in the results page and its not at the expense of the experience that these ads take precedence over other more relevant results. In any event, its nice to see Twitter has started to monetize the site and we can only hope that it will not interrupt the experience too much.