Twitter will start targeting ads at some of the 500m people who visit the social media service but dont log in, the company has announced, placing ads in between tweets on user profile pages and on individual tweet pages.

When people click through to these pages from an external site, such as a Google search or an embedded tweet on a news site, ads will be displayed even if visitors arent logged in Twitter users.

The move is an effort to broaden Twitters reach, and transform some of the cultural impact the service has into advertising revenue. While Twitter has more than 320m monthly users, it estimates there are far more people who see Twitter but never actually sign in.

“By letting marketers scale their campaigns and tap into the total Twitter audience, they will be able to speak to more people in new places using the same targeting, ad creative, and measurement tools,” said Deepak Rao, revenue product manager at Twitter. “Marketers can now maximise the opportunities they have to connect with the audience.”

Serving ads to these visitors could take some of the pressure off the leadership team to kickstart its stalled user growth by growing ad revenues from another source. However, questions will remain on how accurate targeting can be for users who arent logged in, and how much of an impact the ads will have, compared with those served to regular Twitter users.

The feature will initially be rolled out to selected advertisers in the US, UK, Australia and Japan, with a further expansion to additional marketers and more markets planned for the future.