Ad.ly responds to twitter’s in-stream advertising ban. Says it’s not going anywhere.

Ad.ly, the in-stream advertising network, has just issued a response to twitter’s third party in-stream advertising ban by saying it “supports twitter’s decision to disallow any third party tweets” and it’s “business as usual”.

In an email statement and now a blog post, Ad.ly’s new CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh says that:

Ad.ly supports Twitter’s movement today to create standards around in-stream advertising.Twitter’s changes are aimed at discouraging members of the ecosystem who do not maintain the proper balance of user experience and monetization and who are not invested in building long term value on the platform…Since inception, Ad.ly has, and still is operating under Twitter’s approved guidelines and terms of service for advertising on its platform. We look forward to continuing to create long term value for our advertisers and publishers, both of whom are key constituents in
the stream ecosystem.

Ad.ly’s advertising platform enables marketers to pay influential content creators and publishers to send out targeted messages to their followers in the stream. The company employs proprietary algorithms to match advertisements to publishers based on a combination of marketer objectives, publisher content and user feedback. Ad.ly enables marketers to buy ads via its self serve platform at http://www.ad.ly, catering to local and performance advertisers, as well as via its national sales team, servicing the major digital agencies.

Essentially, it’s a flat our refusal that twitter’s decision to ban in stream advertising has any bearing whatsoever on the company as a business.

The first paragraph says twitter aims to “create standards”, which is not the case, twitter’s statement says “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” – which is a flat out ban.

The question it comes down to, at least from my perspective, is how hell bent twitter is about ensuring the only advertising flowing through its customers, sorry users, timelines is its own.

Ad.ly recently raised $5 million in funding, a total of $10 million including a previous $5 million round. Along with the funding, the company hired Arnie Gullov-Singh as its CEO. Talk about bad timing.