Twitter users appear to be pretty happy with the ads they’ve been seeing on the network lately. According to a survey by market research firm Lab42 examined by eMarketer, only 10.9 percent of US Twitter users dislike seeing Promoted Tweets in their timeline.

So why are Twitter users so happy with the ads they’ve been seeing?
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Back in July we reported on how Twitter was a launching a new kind of Promoted Tweet in everybody’s feeds that would start to show ads from brands that you were following.

Well, I guess that wasn’t paying off so well, as Twitter has announced that they will soon begin to show more ads to users on the network, except this time it will be from brands that you don’t follow.

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Reuters is reporting that Twitter will soon open up its advertising API to brands who want to automate and publish ads in bulk.
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McFiva (@McFiva), a full service digital agency, has reportedly been given the rights to sell Twitter ads in Thailand. The company is the first in Thailand to partner with Twitter, but will likely not gain exclusive rights to serve Twitter ads.
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It looks like Twitter is testing out a new format for ad placement: If you access Twitter through Twitter.com, you’ll notice ads now appearing underneath the “Trends” and “Who to Follow” modules on the right-hand sidebar.
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Twitter plans a Google Adwords-style advertising model, according to All Things Digital.

(Read more at 140char.com.)

Ads will be delivered via searches on Twitter, and come packaged in 140 characters or less, which might present a dilemma for businesses to get their message across. That said, we’ve all had a lot of practice at selling tweets, so advertisers should be at least semi-prepared.

(Imagine how much better this would all be if Twitter searches came with TweetRank? Perhaps the users with the most clout could be linked up to the advertising model and rewarded accordingly.)

This is a bit of a no-brainer for Twitter. I’ve often speculated on the plausibility of an Adwords-style system on the network (using Spotify as a case study) and the most surprising part is that it’s taken this long to implement (and still won’t hit the platform for a few months yet).

It’s really too early to speculate about the consequences of all of this without more information, but I do have one question: will the option to advertise be open to everybody, like it is with Google’s Adsense program, or is Twitter going to continue the form it has shown with the suggested user list and verified users, and only offer this service to their personal favourites?

Like it or not, advertisements are coming to Twitter, and they’re coming soon.

“Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.” ~ Dick Costolo, Twitter COO.

The company has to make money. Nobody knows how or even where Twitter is going to implement this business model – Robert Scoble speculates it might come in the form of a supertweet – but this was always something of an inevitability. It’s also a bit of a no-brainer – Twitter is becoming so huge, ignoring this opportunity would be more than a little foolish.

But here’s the thing: they have to get it right. This is art as much as it is science or technical wizardry, trying to balance an online advertising model that is effective inasmuch as people see and click on the ads, but not at the expense of millions of others who categorise it as little more than spam. (And Twitter already has some pretty major issues there.)

Google is the benchmark for this, and Facebook has modelled their own advertising system after the Mountain View giant. But both of these have the luxury of the full screen to play with (they’re not limited to 140 characters), and the knowledge that their visitors are coming directly to them, and not viewing a version of their site through any number of external software clients. Whatever ads Twitter supports need to also go out to Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Tweetie, HootSuite et al, otherwise around three-quarters of the user-base will be completely untapped.

And what about disclosure? Does an ad have to clearly be labelled as such? And if so, what does that mean for the tens of thousands of Twitter accounts now that do nothing but link to affiliate schemes and ‘power systems’? Aren’t they ads, too? Or do only official Twitter ads count?

It will also be interesting to see if Twitter allows its users to participate in the revenue stream, like with Google’s Adsense program. After all – if they’re going to be making money off my tweets, shouldn’t I be entitled to a little of that myself? If not, then don’t be surprised to see a Firefox-style AdBlock bolt-on being made available to Twitter users shortly after ads are turned on.

Right, on to the poll. Let’s assume ads are a given – that sooner rather than later, we’ll start to see ads show up somewhere when we use Twitter. I want to hear how you feel about that. Please complete the poll below, and hit the comments to flesh out your thoughts.