Twitter doesn’t use banner ads, but instead shows users sponsored tweets that are theoretically targeted to them. Yet plenty of visitors to the site aren’t registered users: they’ve followed a link despite not having an account or not being logged in yet. Twitter hadn’t tried selling these visitors’ eyeballs to advertisers until now.

Yes, logged-in users visit Twitter more often, but there are only around 300 million users of the service. Every month, more than 500 million people wander on to the site through Google searches, other search engines, or links.

The experiment will start for desktop users in only four countries: the anglophone U.S., U.K., and Australia, and in Japan. Yes, Twitter has very heavy mobile usage, but desktop users are more likely to click on links to Twitter without already being logged in.

Twitter Extends Ads to Some Logged-Out Visitors, Including Those From Google [AdAge]

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