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Are paid tweets appealing to more brands?

September 28, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There seems to be a lot more interest in paid Tweets at the moment, whether it’s discussing SponsoredTweets, Ad.ly, or Magpie. It certainly seems like more adverts are being placed by these services, judging by the testing I’ve done of Magpie over recent weeks and months.

And apparently brands like KMart are using these services top pay Twitter users either on a per-click or flat fee basis. Meanwhile a host of celebs have signed up for Ad.ly.

Which is fair enough in many ways – after all, it’s down to each individual whether they want to put paid advertising into their Twitter stream, and down to each individual whether they’ll continue to follow someone publishing paid advertising.

But why are so many people trying to dress it up as engagement, relationship building or starting a genuine conversation?

It’s advertising.

If you pay me to post about a product, it’s advertising – that what sponsorship is.

It’s not creating a conversation – that would involve creating something which people might talk about for themselves, or creating an event where people can get together and initiate their own discussions.

Which takes more work than assigning a few thousand pounds or dollars to pay a few tweeters.

I have no inherent problem with anyone accepting paid tweets – I’ve done it to test Magpie, and continued to occasionally do it to cover my hosting costs etc – and it has resulted in a few complaints and un-follows.

And I completely understand why people have exercised their right to un-follow.

The frustrating thing is that so many people are talking so much rubbish about how a sponsored tweet can help you engage, that few people are bothering to actually try to find a model which rewards content/network creators in a way which actually builds on what they are doing, rather than interrupting it!

Monetising Twitter with Magpie Ads – Week 2 round-up

December 12, 2008 By Dan Thornton

When I wrote about my first week of using Magpie to monetise my Twitter account, I wondered if there was the inventory to even get close to the ratios of 5 posts to one advert.

The second week appears to be backing up this theory – since then I’ve had just a couple of advertising messages, raising my earnings up to the 17 Euro mark, despite leaving the ratio at 5:1. At this rate it will be quite a while before I reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros.

But as I said before, this is a good thing in some ways, as one or two adverts a day seems to be an amount that doesn’t offend – and perhaps the number of advertisers will increase after Twitter co-founder Biz Stone picked the service over monetisation alternative Twittad in an LA Times article.

“I think any kinds of projects that focus more on the Twitter updates are more compelling,” Stone said.

For the record, Twittad is claiming 1600 sign-ups, 170 advertisers, and I’ve just finished my first month of allowing them to serve adverts on my profile page. (Feel free to book me for another month right now!)

Interestingly Ev Williams has recently said the economic climate means Twitter will seek to monetise in Quarter 1 2009.

From Cnet: “The revenue plans aren’t just ads or sponsorships. “We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”

Still, in the meantime if you want to try Magpie, why not use a link that also helps to fund 140char? Strangely the Twittad affiliate scheme seems to have a form error at the moment.

Testing Magpie advertising within Tweets…

November 28, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’ve seen a bit of feedback about new Twitter advertising service Magpie, which places paid advertising in your messages on a user-defined ratio – e.g. you can choose anywhere between posting one normal message then an add will appear, up to posting 200 messages before the advert posts.

Advertising is flagged by #magpie or a custom message within each advertising tweet. And you can pre-approve adverts, or allow them to autopost.

I’ve currently got the radio set at 10 normal posts before an advert appears, as I’m a fairly frequent poster. I’ve also asked people in advance for their thoughts, and a couple of people have said they’ll unfollow anyone who even starts using Magpie, whereas the majority have either said they don’t really mind, or they’re fine if it’s just a test.

In all honesty, there’s going to be monetisation of Twitter at some point, and the most logical place for any type of advertising-based revenue is around either the content or search functionality, because those are the areas which get attention from users.

For all we know, some of the growing number of services could be approved by the Twitter team behind the scenes as a way to experiment without alienating any users!

There’s a few reasons for testing:

I hate writing about things I haven’t tried for myself
My Tweeting and 140char were both started with aims other than making money, but at the same time, I don’t really want to be running a blog that costs me money at the moment.
Monetisation will happen for Twitter, and this is one viable method in terms of getting attention. So it’s worth investigating now to be able to provide an educated response if it’s adopted as an official monetisation method.

But in the meantime, here’s the figures for my test:

Magpie started: 28/11/2008. Current followers: 1579.

And if you’re going to sign up to test it or use it yourself, why not help out 140char by using our referral link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

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