cash

Making millions on Twitter

December 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you’re looking for an example of a significant financial return on Twitter, then Dell has long been used as an example – and you can expect it to be quoted even more often after revealing revenues have now risen to $6.5 million globally via Twitter.

Of course that requires almost 1.5 million followers for their main @DellOutlet account, Dell Canada, the $800,000 from @DellnoBrasil and over $150,000 from @DellHomeSalesCA , but it’s still a mightily impressive amount.

Key points for the future from Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca?

Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

There’s a few more bits on the Dell post worth reading.

Ad.ly targets celebs with the same old sponsored Tweet model

September 22, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Ad.ly is a self-serve Twitter advertising network matching advertisers and celebrities to tweet about products. The celeb gets to approve or decline messages, and advertisers get tracking for click-through rates, retweets and geographic locations for Retweeters. The celebs set their own price, but Ad.ly gives suggestions, and the celebrity has to tweet four times in the course of a week, netting them five figure sums for each message if they have more than a millions followers.

So that’s Magpie or Izea Sponsored Tweets system just with only celebrities. And apparently that’s enough to have attracted Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson for the launch.

It’s potentially a good move to only have celebrities involved – that way you only go for the big ticket advertising to generate the share for Ad.ly. But it’s not exactly an evolution of monetising Twitter for individuals.

I’m not going to rant about sponsored tweets as having tested them, I’ve continued to use Magpie on the odd occasion – within a few days each year it effectively pays for my hosting costs, and with a young family and little time to monetise Twitter in other ways, I can just about justify it to myself.

But surely celebrities actually have far more to lose? And less to gain considering the myriad ways which they can effectively monetise their followers and fans through their products? Particularly the hypothetical example Ad.ly is using

Monetise your Twitter account via Direct Messages with Super Chirp!

June 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you’ve got exclusive content, the main way to get value from Twitter followers has been to lead them to your own website – but Super Chirp! aims to change that by monetizing your Direct Messages within Twitter itself.

It’s best suited to celebrities, news outlets or possibly charities, but any publisher can sign up. You set a monthly price between $0.99 and $9.99, and you get to keep a healthy 70% of the cash. Super Chirp! takes 30%, which includes Paypal fees.

As a user, you subscribe for Direct Message feeds via the Super Chirp! site, with Paypal payments, and you can then visit Super Chirp! to see all the messages and sort by publisher.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that’s covered in quite a lot of detail by Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch. In fact, Narendra Rocherolle, CEO of 83 Degrees, which has also launched Power Twitter Firefox Add-On, initially wrote about the idea in a guest post on Techcrunch discussing the Britney Spears Twitter account.

As Arrington hypothesises – this could be one route to cash for Twitter itself, and Super Chirp! could find itself either contending against an official version (perhaps linked in to the new officially verified Twitter accounts), or acquired.

The trickiest bit will be deciding the split between content for building up a network, and content that will be valuable enough to be worth charging for – particularly when it will need to be chunked into 140 character messages. The nature of short messages lends itself to quick links and newsflashes – which is the kind of content which rapidly finds a way around paywalls – possibly leading to a lot of disgruntled ex-followers.

And longer form content will feel immensely disjointed – although there might be some promise in the Twitter novels which have risen up recently, or for some type of Twitter-based soap opera, for example.

But the main way I would imagine most people utilising this tool will be simply to privately broadcast links to exclusive content behind a paywall – which would be an email alert/RSS alternative.

As someone who has experimented with, and witnessed the backlash against, the likes of Magpie adverts being included in streams, and Twitad sponsored backgrounds, it seems slightly ironic that the main 3rd party applications to make money on Twitter appear to be short form versions of traditional display advertising and paywalls – the very things which newspapers are maligned for seeing as the sole revenue options.

Are there better ways to directly generate cash from Twitter when it comes to content? Or is it always going to be a publicity/network tool to drive revenue from elsehwere?

Money arrives on Twitter with Twitpay

December 19, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Rather than making money from Twitter advertising, Twitpay allows you to transfer money to any other Twitter user with a simple Tweet.

Money by jenn_jenn on Flickr (CC Licence) — 'Money' by jenn_jenn on Flickr (CC Licence)

Send an @ message, for example ‘@badgergravling twitpay $5 for running 140char.com’ or via the twitpay site.

Adding funds to Twitpay can be done via Paypal, and if you’ve got over $10 in your account, you can spend it as an Amazon gift card, a donation to a Twitpay charity, or to Twitpay itself – meanwhile the service takes a flat rate of $0.01 for every $1

It’s a stunningly simple idea to have a ‘Paypal for Twitter’, that came out of a startup weekend. You can read more about how the idea came about on the FAQs page.

What’s interesting is that this is a new approach to providing a monetisable service via Twitter, and possibly creating a new Twitter economy. The main question will be whether enough people have an urge or reason to transfer money to someone on Twitter leaving to use an existing service – and whether more business ideas will appear now the facility is available.

For instance, considering you can place a coffee order via Twitter, perhaps Twitpay could let you pay for it instantly as well, without the need for cash or a debit card?

Edit: Just discovered an alternative in Tipjoy, which also allows for payment via Twitter messages.

Making money with Twitter backgrounds

November 19, 2008 By Dan Thornton

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?