As has been pointed out several times, Twitter isn’t profitable, but the company been trying desperately to change that fact. Twitter has made a mad scramble to score big name partnerships and to develop new advertising programs in order to raise stock prices.
Variety reports that American Express and Fox have teamed up with Twitter to incorporate the credit card giant’s ads in front of clips of Fox shows, such as The Mindy Project and New Girl—which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, until you remember that this isn’t YouTube, and those clips were already ads in and of themselves. Under Twitter’s new Amplify program, TV networks were able to partner with Twitter to fill individual users’ feeds with clips and related programming from shows they might be interested in. Such tweets would be marked as “promoted by” and then the show name. The new partnership between Fox and American Express will still be part of Amplify, but instead of just an ad to watch Mindy Kaling make out with yet another impossibly attractive white male, Twitter users will now have to slog through a clip of American Express’ fee-riddled credit cards first.
