Twitter announced Thursday that it will start showing ads to its “logged out” audience, a group of roughly 500 million people who visit Twitter every month but who don’t have active user accounts. That means if you click on a tweet that appears in a Google search, for instance, you may see ads on that tweet page or on the tweet creator’s profile.
This is a huge deal for Twitter. First, it’s important to some advertisers, who don’t think Twitter has enough registered users — especially compared to Facebook — to matter, and also to Wall Street, for the same reasons. But the company has argued for years now that its audience is much bigger than the 320 million people who log in each month, and it has been telling Wall Street that it can make money off people without Twitter accounts. Now it’s finally doing that.
