[ColinCera]

I've never understood why Twitter doesn't run way more ads than they do. When I view my Twitter timeline in a browser there's an enormous amount of unused space on both sides of the timeline and it would not bother me one little bit if they displayed some ads in that space. In fact, it would be much less distracting/detracting than sticking sponsored tweets into the middle of my feed.

Like most people, I find ads kind of annoying, but Twitter's an unusual case — I would be 0% less inclined to use Twitter if they put some ads in that totally unused space.

Twitter might lose approximately .01% of their users if they ran ads, but they'd be making billions in profits.

[matthewmacleod]

What proportion of Twitter users access it through the browser, though? I suspect a lot of users (especially heavy ones) don't use it all that much.

That means ads need to be inserted into the stream, which is much more annoying. I'd argue that there are already too many, myself…

[ColinCera]

You're right. Now that I think about it, the majority of Twitter user probably happens on phones and tablets, where there is no out-of-feed real estate for advertising, and a smaller percentage of people on desktops use a native app instead of the browser site.

So the revenue potential is probably not as much as I'd imagined.

And I fully agree that I don't want to see an increased number of sponsored tweets inserted in my feed.

[theklub]

How many people run ad block plus already? I feel like overwhelming people with ads would just push more to block them entirely.

[ColinCera]

Yes, but my point is that ads in the empty space around the central feed would not be "overwhelming" to anyone except chronic complainers.

Ad blocking is a problem for all ad-supported web sites. There are heavy-handed ways to thwart it, and I personally wouldn't mind if Twitter used such tactics — Twitter is a valuable service and I don't have any objection to them making money to keep the lights on and making a ton of profit on top.