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Comment by chton | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually impressed they found a way to monetize their platform that doesn't involve obtrusive ads. This seems like a good source of income for them and their clients, and as long as they don't force you to follow commercial accounts, it will be almost invisible to anyone who doesn't want to see it.

I'm cautiously optimistic.

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Exactly my thoughts. I think at this moment we are all so scared of possible future changes, always for the sake of profits against users' will, that something as simple and inoffensive as this is actually a pleasant surprise.

I hope they will be happy enough with the button's results to not jump to other, more irritating changes. And also hope that this is not just a door for some future ads spike.

No, it's ads. You can just now buy from the ads directly.

I don't know where you get that idea. They explicitly say "some Tweets from our test partners will feature a “Buy” button", there is no mention of ads. The implication is, if I don't follow their partners, I won't see the buy button.

Until they start injecting the buy features into regular sponsored tweets. That will happen for sure.

That's a possibility, but that still wouldn't be more intrusive than the current sponsored tweets. If anything, if this model is successful, they might even reduce the amount of sponsored stuff appearing in your timeline.

A platform rejecting ad customers? Not going to happen, ever.

"Number of ads to show" is something that can be optimized. Too much ads have a negative effect on your entire platform, so you need to strike the balance. 'As much as possible, but not too much'. If they can improve perception of their platform and improve the view-to-click ratios of their buy buttons by showing less sponsored content and rejecting customers, they will. A company always tries to find the economic optimum.

Just because you voluntarily follow the ads does it not still make them ads?

Then any corporate accounts you follow now are 'ads'. It's an added button, no more, no less. If that magically makes an otherwise neutral tweet an ad, you need a more rigorous definition of advertisement.

No, it's not ads. Sponsored tweets will likely get the same treatment but this is the start of a two-sided marketplace where users stay on the site to buy an item from a tweet of someone they're following, rather than the old method which was to follow a bitly or gumroad link.

Any idea what the payment commision will be?

If I had to guess it'd be similar to Gumroads 5% + 25cents.

One use case I can think of that might be suited to real time updates/shopping would be when a football/soccer team releases a new season shirt. I follow the EPL, there's always a huge fuss in the media when the big teams release their new shirt (not sure if this applies to American sports), if the images broke first on Twitter it could be a good source of sales.

The downside is that it would be quite one-off, the interest would die quickly.

> a way to monetize their platform that doesn't involve obtrusive ads.

Promoted Tweets are quite intrusive already...

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