Please Twitter, just implement normal advertising.

Twitter, you tried promoted tweets. You tried promoted trends. You tried the Quick Bar (Dickbar). I think it’s time we all moved on, and accepted that normal advertising in some form is going to be the best source of revenue, and in comparison to said Dickbar, the least intrusive method of advertising for users.

The ‘Quick Bar’ in the offical iOS Twitter iPhone app is really the net result of all the previous attempts by Twitter to monetize its service. Marco Arment, the founder of Instapaper, summed up just what went wrong in the implementation of the bar in a blog post earlier this week: (you can read the full post here)

We don’t know Twitter’s true reason for adding the Quick Bar. Presumably, it’s part of a longer-term strategy. But today, from here, it looks like an extremely poorly thought-out feature, released initially with an extremely poor implementation, with seemingly no benefits to users.

The Quick Bar isn’t offensive because we don’t want Twitter making money with ads, or because we object to changes in the interface. It’s offensive because it’s deeply bad, showing complete disregard for quality, product design, and user respect, and we’ve come to expect a lot more from Twitter.

The fundamental point here is that the majority of Twitter users would have no qualms with the implementation of generic ads on the Twitter homepage, we’ve become so accustomed to seeing advertisements on every other site that it’s likely many users would not even notice the change. Perhaps, however, that is the what is holding the company back: is advertising no longer a sustainable source of revenue for a major company? The New York Time seems to think so. Despite that, the inescapable truth is that Twitter at least needs to try this method, the Quick Bar has demonstrated that they aren’t unwilling to take risks that may turn away users in their quest for a reliable revenue stream. Facebook seems to have had success with unobtrusive online advertising, and if Twitter can develop an advertising system that is even more closely targeted, it could prove a huge success. With the immense volume of data available from the tweets of every user, Twitter is in an unparalleled position to offer targeted ads that even Google can only dream of. Instead, they have resorted to immeasurably crude methods like the Quick Bar, and blocking the creation of any additional third-party Twitter apps, which skirt around this inevitable net result.

Twitter, whichever method you do choose, please just remove the Quick Bar from my iPhone.

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