140Char

Sponsored Post

Having spent some time running advertising with Twitter, I know how divisive it can be – and seeing as I know there’s a big group who split their time between microblogging and full-length blogging, I thought it was worthwhile accepting an offer for a sponsored post on the UK launch of blogging monetisation service Ebuzzing.

It’s fast and simple to register, and the main benefit is that you can achieve a good rate of reward for recommending or allowing services to advertise or pay for a post – but the choice of topics etc is entirely down to you. There’s no obligation to post anything you don’t agree with.

I’ve used Ebuzzing for a post on TheWayoftheWeb, and found it easy to use. There are three options to pick from – sponsored articles, videos served by a dedicated player, or videos and banners served in a syndicated player.

All posts are “no follow” within articles, and full disclosure and advertiser names have to be displayed, meaning no room for any shenanigans, and no risk of search engine penalties. And over 600 brands have used the service to propose campaigns including Coca-Cola, MTV, MasterCard, Toyota, etc.

So if you’d rather monetise your blog than your microblogging, then Ebuzzing is a simple and effective way to discover opportunities to do it for a decent reward, rather than struggling to optimise affiliate links for what might be small audiences, or having to go and attract direct advertising. And having seen an increasing amount of content providers beginning to use in-Twitter advertising, I’d hazard a guess that microblogging-related advertisers will be looking to place content via Ebuzzing in the future.

Register on ebuzzing.com

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 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

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?

One way to monetise Twitter seems to be using feeds/information outside of the site itself – good news for sites and businesses, if not for Twitter directly.

Probably the best use so far is by Mashable, revealed today. In conjunction with viral scientist, Mashable contributor and Twitter uber-analyst Dan Zarrella, the site now has a widget displaying ‘Twitter Brand Sponsors’.

Quoting from Mashable:

‘Twitter Brand Sponsors is a small step towards our sociable ads goal. Here’s how it works: a limited number of brands (and one charity!) looking to engage with the social media community can have their latest Tweets syndicated into the Mashable sidebar, and interested visitors can choose to connect with those brands on Twitter.’

The first sponsors are Jetblue and Mailchimp, indicating that there’s interest at launch – it will be interesting to see how many companies are engaged with a suitable Twitter presence to benefit.

And it also removes the questions around the previous example of Glam’s Twitter feed widget, which displayed moderated #Oscar tweets in a widget with advertising:

Is it right to profit from user-generated content created on another site, and without the awareness of those creating the content?

Would advertisers, even those related to the target audience/subject get enough value from display advertising around Twitter content.

Instead, the Mashable approach allows people to see interaction from businesses (and charities), and decide whether or not to engage.

I have to admit, I’m wondering whether they’ll white-label the Twitter widget, as I’d be keen to run something similar!

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)

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.

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.

So I’ve been using Magpie to serve advertising within my Twitter feed for one week now, and I thought it was a good time to post the results and reaction.

I started on November 28th, warning my followers that I was about to start testing the system, and immediately lost one follower, with about 4 of the 1598 warning me that they would either unfollow immediately, or consider dropping me if it became more than a test.

One week later, and my follower account is currently 1669 followers, partly as a result of my normal addition of interesting people which has also seen my following count raise by a similar amount.

Magpie offers the ability to set the ratio of advertising to normal messages, and I’ve stuck with the 5:1 default ratio as a starting point to see how much inventory was served – within 7 days, and with around 500+ tweets, Magpie has so far served three advertising messages, earning me a little over 10 Euros.

So far, since the initial response to the test I’ve not had a single message regarding the advertising place in my tweets, and I’m not aware of anyone responding unfavourably.

Reaction so far:

So far it’s seemed that Magpie’s inventory means the adverts being served are closer to the maximum 200:1 ratio than 5:1, which is probably a good thing – particular after the adverse reaction it generated on launch.

It’s made me think that perhaps rather than a tweet to ad ratio (As the number of tweets can vary enormously for any user per day), perhaps there should also be an adverts per day ratio, if the inventory being served increases. I do wonder how many potential advertisers were dissuaded by the outcry on Twitter, and whether the inventory will increase now that the dust has settled.

It also means that it will take 5 weeks for me to reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros at current rates – not terrible when compared to Google Adsense etc, and also not bad for something which wasn’t really monetised until now (I am also trialling Twittad to see if monetising Twitter profile backgrounds is realistic)

I’m definitely intending to keep the test going for a while longer to see what happens to advertising ratios, and to see if there is any more response to the presence of adverts in my Twitter feed (Also to see if the payout system works).

Incidentally, it’s also running on the 140char test account: @140char_com, which I’m going to be using more in the future to test services which may carry an element of risk to them, after the growing concerns that various 3rd party applications require both your Twitter username and password. This way I can identify which services are a real risk without running the chance of compromising my main personal account which I’ve built up over 18 months or so! With just 18 followers, the first ad paid just 0.02 Euros!

Let me know if you’ve been using the service, or your reaction to it, particularly if you’ve unfollowed me because of it!

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

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:

Problogger's custom Twitter design by Twitter Images

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?

It took me a couple of passes to get the value of Blip.fm as opposed to existing streaming radio online like last.fm. At first, for some reason, it wasn’t running properly and playing each track in turn for me, which didn’t help! But now it’s becoming a great way to discover new music recommended by my friends, even if I normally revert to streaming my last.fm library for longer periods. The two compliment each other is the same way as someone like John Peel complimented by record collection, but I couldn’t always make it through an entire show before some obscure German techno forced me to change radio station.

Blip.fm helps me find new music by effectively allowing users to Twitter with each song they choose, giving it some context, or publicly proclaiming their love for it etc. And I can aggregate these choices into my own list, give ‘props’ to other users for good choices, and filter the overall stream via my friends, just as I would with Twitter.

Where it might give a clue to revenue streams for microblogging is in offering the direct link to buy any track as an MP3 via Amazon. So if I like a particular track or artist, the opportunity to make a quick impulse purchase is always there – and it’s backed up by allowing me to listen to the track based on recommendations by my friends.

The only weakness is that not every track is available, and I need to be aware that I want to listen to this track offline, in my car, on an Ipod, at the time that I’m experiencing it…or be able to find it easily, and at the moment there’s no way to search my Playlist, or add individual songs to my Amazon wishlist.

But if what if this model was more widely applied – to offline magazines and books for example. And to products as well? One Twitter Affiliates scheme which wasn’t tied into a sole retailer, but operated as an aggregation service to allow me to recommend almost anything, and offer a direct link?

It’s probably the quickest and simplest method of monetising the Twitterati. And people can be persuaded to link their recommendations to returns for themselves or even for charity, as something like Squidoo shows.

It would be possible to test the theory if individuals listed book recommendations etc via existing Amazon etc affiliate accounts, but this may lead to confusion and disappointment if it isn’t flagged up as such before an unsuspecting user follows the link – but Twitter and the extra 20 characters could flag referral posts quickly and uniformly.

The only question for me is who tries it first – Twitter, or an enterprising external team? Anyone know a good developer?

Twitter users were a bit shocked to suddenly find their pages looking rather different at 11pm on Thursday, July 17, 2008.

Sadly user error meant I didn’t capture a screen grab, but I can say it was more of a lick of paint than a rebuild, with a ‘rougher’ look, and less clean lines…

Considering the second round of VC funding, the purchase of Summize to become Twitter search (which I’ve been meaning to comment on until life interfered), and the hint of a redesign, I think there’s enough evidence of major movement in Twitterville. Could this be the start of a rapid move to money and repaying the investors?

Edit: Techcrunch managed to get a screencap. Probably why they get a slightly bigger audience than 140char!