If you Twitter, you have the opportunity to get paid while you send your micro-blogging messages. A new application called TwittAd will match you with advertisers who want to plug their product on Twitter pages.
Digital Journal — If you Twitter, you have the opportunity to get paid for sending your micro-blogging messages. A new application called TwittAd will match you with advertisers who want to plug their product on Twitter.
As a Twitter user, you list how many “followers” you have on your page, and you also write for how much you want to sell an ad on your Twitter page. Advertisers can purchase someone’s profile page backgrounds, and TwittAd collects a 5 per cent commission on the transaction. The ad appears in the left-hand part of the page.
The company’s website addresses one of the primary concerns with bringing ads to Twitter: “Our goal is to not fill Twitter with ugly & obnoxious advertisements. We give advertisers templates and ideas to help keep the integrity of Twitter background images.”
The website also offers examples of several Twitter users and the prices they set for the Twitter ads. Mexican Twitterer winiberto, who has 351 followers, priced his ad at $25 for one week. Another user, 3amJosh, set his price for $5 per week. Both users were matched with the advertiser FilmFitti.com.
In an interview with DigitalJournal.com, TwittAd CEO James Eliason explains the payment process: The Twitter user posts the dollar amount for the entire advertising period, like $50 for a month, he says. Every hour that ad is served they get a portion of that $50 in their “virtual account” set up by TwittAd. Once the ad is done serving, after that month, the money is transferred into their real account. If the Twitter user removes the ad before the advertisers time expires, then he or she doesn’t receive 100 per cent of that money, and the advertiser gets a credit via PayPal.
Eliason says there are 138 current active users of TwittAd and 83 profiles “for sale.” Ten advertisers are on board and Eliason notes “all of our marketing efforts to alert advertisers have come from blogs and also through our @twittad account on Twitter.”
TwittAd is a sign of the digital times – bringing monetization to Twitter introduces another form of compensation for using social media services. Why didn’t Twitter act on this idea before a third-party company did?
But there’s a couple flies in TwittAd’s soup. First, it remains to be seen whether Twitter users en masse will welcome advertising on their pages, if only to make a few extra bucks. Twitter’s interface is clean so cluttering the page with small ads could remind people how Facebook lost its groove.
Also, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld believes TwittAd suffers from a major flaw: most people don’t go to another’s Twitter page; they simply subscribe to the “tweets”. He writes: The only way ads are going to work on Twitter is if they are blended into the message stream and sent out as Tweets.
Eliason responds, “I think ads in Tweets might work if it is regulated by the Twitter user and not regulated by Twitter. The Twitter user ultimately should have the choice on if they want ads on their Twitter page as well as within their Tweets.”
