pandesmos

Hi HN,

Indie game dev here. I've got a few titles under my belt and so I've begun looking into doing paid ads on various platforms.

One of the big things I don't understand though is: How is Twitter able to put ads on top of ads?

For example, just this morning I was served a promoted post for "The Masked Singer" show, but instead of serving me a video for the show, I was served a "T-Mobile" ad accompanied by the message "Video will play after ad".

Sure it's their platform, but as a little guy my concern is, if I pay to have a video made, and I pay Twitter to promote my posts, am I actually just going to be paying Twitter to advertise other companies on my promotion? I don't want people to buy cell phone services, I want them to buy my books.

I couldn't find anything about this when I went through twitter's help pages, is there maybe an industry term for this sort of thing I should be looking for? I don't notice this behavior on other platforms, but are there comparable "tricks" out there that say, Facebook does?

Or does this only occur when there's some kind of partnership between the two advertising companies (in this case The Masked Singer and T-Mobile), and they've asked for this to happen?

Thanks for any insight!