Chief operating office of Twitter, Dick Costolo, has forecasted an advertising boom as the micro-blogging platform prepares to launch a new advertising model.

According to the company’s blog, its ‘Promoted Tweets’ platform will take the form of ordinary Tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to wider groups of users.

It has so far signed up Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America to the platform.

Costolo told Wired.com that he believed the company will eventually become profitable, but he declined to provide a timeframe for achieving profitability.

“We were valued at over a billion dollars last September, so we’re going to live in a world where we need to be generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We’re thinking about big, big numbers,” Costolo told Reuters.