The background of your Twitter profile seems to be a fertile place for people experimenting with making money from microblogging. I’ve previously written about individuals auctioning their Twitter profiles for charity and raising $1002, and also advertising service Twittad, which allows advertisers to place adverts on your Twitter profile (I’m currently testing the service – Twittad itself is advertising on my profile at $44).
Now a very different service is seeking to make money from Twitter profiles. TwitterImage.com offers custom images for your Twitter profile. At the moment there’s a special offer running with a free design if you have 2000+ followers and allow a small credit line for the service in your background. If you’ve got less than 2000 followers, then there’s a 25% off the normal price of $100. For your $75 you get a custom background, and one minor revision. Or you can pay the full price of $100 if you think you’ll need more than one design or revision.
For example:
I wish them well with the service, but I have to admit to having my doubts about the viability of it. While I understand that designers need to be reimbursed for their talents, how many Twitter users would value their background enough to spend $75 or $100 on it?
Obviously you can insert your contact and bio details into the image – but there is a link for an about page on your site etc. And experimenting with your own imagery costs nothing if you use an open source image editor like Gimp, and have the time to play around with it, plus you still need to supply any imagery you want to be used.
And then there’s the issue that you’d be paying more to have a custom Twitter background than I’m aware of any advertiser paying – so if they’re not seeing the value yet, do you think there’s a huge advantage in having a custom made Twitter background? And are you valuing it at $75-$100?
The ProBlogger background sits really well with the Twitter interface. Dan, how much visibility do you think these will have considering how ‘disintermediated’ profile URLs can become? My Twitter-desktop-client-addicted friends tell me they rarely visit Twitter.com (I’m on it every day).
I have to admit I’m not convinced by any monetisation of a Twitter background, although I have spoken to the guys at Twittad, and will be asking them for some idea of their response rates.
Personally, even when using the web interface, I tend to scan through the Tweet content and then click on someone’s external link rather than examining their background for information or advertising, so unless it attempts to work on a subliminal level, I’m not sure it will work.
Having said that, I could be proved wrong!
How much is your twitter profile worth?
@Jonas,
Thanks for the comment, and I’m happy to write in more detail about Tweetvalue to save you having to post the link!
But at the end of the day, the point most online valuation services ignore is that a Twitter profile is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay.
@Dan: Your right. Maybe there is a need for a buy/sell-twitter profiles market? But that’s probably against their policy etc
I thought about creating a site to sell my twitter background design services, but I soon discovered that these exist in abundance already, ranging anywhere from $25 to $100 and up. Instead, I created the “Twitter Template System” which allows anyone to create their own twitter background at a fraction of the cost they would pay a professional graphic designer to have it done.
With only 4-5 million estimated users, Twitter is still in its infancy, though, so the real market for twitter themes remains to be seen!