Last June, Twitter released an update to its platform, introducing stickers and allowing Twitter fans to enrich their social networking experience by layering stickers on top of photos before sharing them with other Twitter users. Now Twitter is upping the sticker game in hopes to monetize the feature, and today the company has announced Promoted Stickers, which is a way for other companies to pay Twitter for having their custom made stickers show up at the top of the Featured stickers list.
The first company to launch ads through Twitter’s new Promoted Stickers feature is Pepsi, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given the fact that Pepsi CFO, Hugh Johnston, has been a Twitter board member since the beginning of August. Evidently, Twitter intends to make a bigger profit off of advertising, and the Promoted Stickers feature might be a step in the right direction, assuming of course that more companies will be willing to promote stickers of their own. At the moment there are no other details regarding what other partners Twitter might have for Promoted Stickers, but the feature is rolling out today, so it may not take long before more Promoted Stickers will show up in the Featured list.
In the recent quarters, Twitter has had difficulties with keeping revenues above expectations, despite the fact that the number of monthly users throughout the first quarter of the year was on the rise. In Q2 2016, Twitter’s user base grew by three million new monthly active users, yet the company also reported profits of 13 cents / share on $602 million revenue, all the while the Wall Street was expecting 10 cent share prices on revenues of $607 million. Needless to say, the introduction of Promoted Stickers might increase the company’s revenues in the foreseeable future, but all that remains to be seen. For now, it looks like Twitter is testing the waters together with Pepsi, but we don’t expect one sticker to change much in terms of revenue, so only time will tell what other companies will be interested in promoting themselves through Twitter’s new feature. Keep in mind that the feature is expected to roll out today, so keep an eye on the Featured stickers list if you want to be among the first to use the Pepsi sticker in one of your Tweets.