Twitter Bans All Third Party Ad Platforms Injecting In-stream advertising

Update: Title updated to reflect this is in-stream advertising platforms, more at the foot of the post.

In a lengthy post, Twitter has just announced it will ban all third party ad platforms that inject advertising into users twitter streams. This technically means the end of Ad.ly and potentially the just launched (as in today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt) Tweetup.

Tthe significant part of Twitter’s announcement is below:

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

This is huge! Is Twitter trying to push out any ad competition in this move? What do you think? Leave a comment below…