Reports The Self-Service Twitter Ad Platform Is Live May Be Greatly Exaggerated

That self-serve advertising platform that MediaPost got a look at? Well, Twitter is denying that it’s the self-service platform it plans to roll out this year for long-tail advertisers, according to a report in ReadWrite Web.

“Reports that Twitter is testing a self-serve ad platform are inaccurate,” the company’s PR folks tweeted this afternoon. “We plan to test our self-serve ad product later this year.”

The interface viewed by MediaPost, which Twitter reportedly said was part of its Promoted Products offering, lets advertisers buy promoted tweets and promoted accounts. Twitter told ReadWrite Web that the product was not completely self-service, but required advertisers or agencies to work with an in-house sales representative.

According to the MediaPost piece, advertisers enter a date and time to run the campaign, set a maximum bid and daily budget, and then select “interests” and “search keywords,” that will apparently help Twitter determine when to trigger the ad’s display. For promoted accounts, Twitter looks at other accounts that users’ follow as an indicator of when the ad should be shown.

EMarketer predicts that Twitter will earn $150 million in advertising revenue this year, and $250 million in 2012.