Huh. That article says basically what I said: "The payoff for Twitter will come if it can get developers to embrace MoPub, its advertising product, because it gets a cut of any ad revenue."

In which case, I'd be kinda skeptical. If the other tools are mainly loss-leaders for advertising, then Twitter will be prone to limiting or canceling them when the internal politics change.

Which is exactly what they did with API access previously: they cost money to operate and weren't for the moment seen as directly beneficial, so what was previously going to be free forever was suddenly cut back.