THESE DAYS, PEOPLE in journalism are getting creative about generating revenue. Advertising is simply not raising the cash it used to.Philly.com, the website connected to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, is experimenting with sponsored tweets. A company can pay to say that a headline posted by philly.com was "brought to you by ..."
Is there anything wrong with that? Does this deceive the reader? Or is this the same as an advertisement running between segments of a newscast?
3 comments:
I don't think that it deceives the reader because a lot of famous people and large companies get others to generate their tweets. There is nothing wrong with it, but if the advertisers want to continue making money they have no choice but to create more innovative ways to reach potential customers.
I think sponsored tweets are just the next round of advertisement that we will see. To me, a sponsored tweet is no different than watching a newscast or listening to the radio. In our world of changing media, it should be expected that news organization have the opportunity to generate revenue through social media. As the world migrates to social media, the advertising dollars will follow.
There is no deception of a reasonably intelligent consumer with sponsored Tweets. This is the equivalent of a quarter page ad by Kohl's in a daily newspaper. If I am looking at that page and it is about Phil's plans for Pierre, I am not going to think that the owner of Kohl's is a big Juan Pierre fan or that he or she thinks Juan Pierre is a better outfielder than John Mayberry. It's just an ad and the journalistic entity received a few bucks to keep the lights on.
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