Twitter has unveiled a plan to use advertising to turn its massive popularity into cash.
Biz Stone, one of the three co-founders of the micro-blogging service, provided details of the long-awaited revenue-generating plan in a post on the Twitter blog.
Mr Stone said the advertising service, called 'Promoted Tweets', would allow businesses and organisations to highlight their messages known as 'tweets' to a wider group of users.
He said a number of companies, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America, had signed up to take part in the first phase of the advertising programme.
Mr Stone acknowledged that Twitter had been slow to add a money-making aspect to the service.
But he said the four-year-old company, which has survived on tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding, 'wanted to optimise for value before profit'.
Mr Stone said 'tweets' sponsored by advertisers would be featured at the top of Twitter.com's search results pages with only one 'promoted tweet' being displayed per page.
He said 'Promoted Tweets' would eventually be allowed to be shown in the many applications for using Twitter made by outside software developers.
Twitter has allowed Google and Microsoft to index Twitter messages in their search engines for an undisclosed sum of money but the advertising service unveiled today is the company's first serious money-making venture.
