Ther have been two wholly unrelated truths about Twitter almost since the service premiered. The first is that it has a black and Hispanic userbase that is much larger than the internet as a whole. The second is the service remains unprofitable. Twitter is hoping to seize on the first point to rectify the second.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal today, Twitter is working on targeting advertising toward its Hispanic and black users.

In November, Twitter hired marketing veteran Nuria Santamaria to a new position as multicultural strategist, leading its effort to target black, Hispanic and Asian-American users.

Together, those groups account for 41% of Twitter's 54 million U.S. users, compared with 34% of the users of rival Facebook and 33% of all U.S. Internet users, according to Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.

Ms. Santamaria says advertisers want to know more about racial and ethnic minorities on Twitter, from basic numbers to the languages in which they tweet. Last month, Twitter began showing ad agencies data from a coming report saying that Hispanics tweet more often than other users and activity among them rises when the conversation is about technology.

This is a tactic that has worked very well in other media like radio and TV. Also, I would imagine that Twitter can microtarget specific advertising based on keywords and demographic info. I suppose my biggest question in reading that Wall St. Journal article was "what took them so long?"