Wednesday, July 14, 2010

TweetUp Signs Four New Publishers

Pasadena-based TweetUp, the Twitter advertising firm started by Idealab's Bill Gross, is expanding out its network of sites this morning, saying that it has added four new publishers to its roster. The firm said it has signed distribution agreements with Business.com, Netvibes, TheFreeDictionary.com, and several un-named newspapers. All of those sites will serve up search results from TweetUp. TweetUp said the deal brings its distribution to 100 million unique users each month. The firm offers an online marketplace for ranking searches for tweets from the Twitter micro-messaging service, allowing users on a variety of web sites to pull real-time search results from Twitter, with rankings influenced by marketplace bids on keywords by Twitter users. The model for the site is similar to the cost-per-click ads originally developed by Gross for Internet search engines. Financial details of the deals with those publishers was not disclosed, however, the firm offers up revenue share agreements with the sites in its network. The firm also has deals with various Twitter clients and related software providers. TweetUp is venture backed by Index Ventures, betaworks, Revolution LLC, First Round Capital, Jason Calacanis and Jeff Jarvis.