Twitter has been struggling to find new ways to make money and add users, and now it appears it has struck gold with its Stickers feature. The feature was launched recently, and in no time, the company turned it into a money maker. Brands have to purchase Promoted Stickers of their own, for which they are required to pay a hefty amount to the micro-blogging firm, according to Buzzfeed.
Charging premiums for Promoted Stickers
Twitter, which launched the feature with a high-profile partnership with Pepsi, hasn’t disclosed the price it charges for these branded stickers, but Buzzfeed has dug up the financial details behind this new cash cow and found that the brands wishing to run Promoted Stickers ad campaigns on its platform are being asked to pay $500,000. Since the set price tag is so steep, the company is throwing in some additional perks hoping to lure in advertisers. The brands willing to pay half-a-million dollars are also given access to other ad options such as Promoted Tweets.
Twitter launched the Stickers feature in June, allowing users to decorate their photos with an expanding set of resizable emojis. It sounds similar to Snapchat but has a unique element as well in the form of its ability to categorize the images. Each sticker acts as its own hashtag, and when a user taps on a selected sticker, Twitter shows all the images tagged with it, notes Digital Trends.
Posting Olympics GIFs can get you banned
Twitter continues to struggle with its lack of control over abuse. The company receives numerous complaints regarding this, but most of the time it replies that it isn’t against the company’s terms of service and therefore could not shut down anyone’s account for it.
However, what’s surprising is that the company recently shut down the account of an individual who posted GIFs of action from the Olympic Games in Brazil, reports Fortune. Earlier this month, Jim Weber posted several such images, and it didn’t take long for the company to ban his account permanently and send him a message about it.
Weber narrated the entire incident on LinkedIn, saying he posted three brief moving images from the Olympic Games and that this was an offense in the eyes of the micro-blogging site. These moving images were that of gymnast Aly Raisman’s floor routine, a Japanese wrestler celebrating, and a diver whose performance won her accolades.
