Twitter to roll out sponsored tweets to 50 more countries

Social network Twitter will extend sponsored tweets to 50 more countries as it works to bolster its advertising revenue.

The company, which has about 140 million users and is yet to release full details of the countries that will next receive sponsored tweets, made the announcement at an event in France.

Sponsored tweets are currently only available in the US, UK and Japan, but the social network will now make them available in Latin America and a number of Western European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Twitter remains heavily dependent on the US for advertising revenue and eMarketer estimates that about 90 per cent of the microblogging site’s 2012 ad revenue of $US259.9 million is expected to come from the United States.

The company reported expects to generate $US1 billion of revenue in 2014.

The Guardian reported Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo as telling attendees at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity that the company is not yet releasing dates for the expansion of the sponsored tweets.

“There is a ton of demand but we don’t have dates as yet,” Costolo said. “That is one of the great things of being private, I don’t have to discuss these things.”

Unlike many websites that use display advertising, Twitter relies on ads embedded in streams on its site to generate revenue. Products in Twitter’s promoted advertisements line-up include Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted accounts.

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