140Char

It seems that Twitter is about to launch another way for the company to generate revenue, via the @earlybird account.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb believes Twitter will use the account in the same way as Dell – publishing special offers for people to follow and click on.

He quoted Twitter’s Carolyn Penner, who says there are interesting things in store for the account, and that you might be one of the first to find out if you keep waking up early.

It makes sense to have an authorised Twitter special offer stream, I guess, and as Marshall writes, it could be split into seperate streams for music, books, electronics etc. And it’ll probably be reasonably popular.

But it’s such a disapointment in my opinion.

So far Twitter has only made revenue in one way which has had a big impact – licencing the realtime stream of information to the big search engines. That’s not only made them money, but also changed the way a lot of people are finding out about subjects, even if they’re not Twitter users.

But Promoted Tweets are essentially display advertising which takes away revenue from the content creators, and hands it to Twitter as the platform owner instead.

And now we could essentially see one or more streams which are effectively RSS feeds of special offers?

It feels very much like going for the ‘low hanging fruit’. A quick and simple way to get some revenue that they didn’t have before, by doing something simple and low cost, and from a business perspective, I can’t knock them for doing it.

But in all the talk of the revolutionary new communication platform, and the promises of amazing new ways they’d generate money, I can’t help feeling like they’re not even matching existing established tools like Adsense.

Millions of users, billions of messages, all the connections between people, location, and content – there needs to be something which utilises these things in a way which ties relevance, convenience, accessibility and recommendation. And how about embracing something truly different, like Vendor Relationship Management.

Then we might really have something for revenue generation for companies which matches the impact of Twitter for communication.

I’m a big fan of both Tumblr and Posterous, despite not really having the time/project to make the best use of them at the moment. So the fact that Tumblr has released a new feature, some interesting statistics and signs of new revenue streams launching soon has reignited my thoughts on how I could use the service effectively.

The new feature is the ability to add static pages – which will aid companies and bloggers looking to keep content highlighted. Adding a page is simple, with three layouts to choose from.

And it will only build on some pretty impressive statistics released today – 1 billion page views in February 2010 for starters. It also has 2 million posts every day, 15,000 new posts daily, and 18 new posts and reblogs every second.

Incidentally, 1 billion page views in February equals 36 million page views per day, 25,000 page views per minute, or 400 per second. And Tumblr has put together a nice infographic to show off the info:

And if that isn’t enough, apparently there are also plans to unveil two new revenue generating features next month, powered by the widget mysteriously pictured below:

For a personal or simple company blog, I’d definitely recommend checking out Tumblr or Posterous. They’re easier to update than a traditional hosted blog platform (whether Blogger or WordPress), and offer as many design options etc. Ultimately a full self-hosted blog platform such as WordPress (Which this site uses) offers some additional advantages, but if you don’t want the hassle or advertising, then go with the microblogging platforms.

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

Techcrunch recently picked up on a poll by Accredited Supplier of 1200 UK businesses who are currently using Twitter, and echoed the findings that ‘UK Business bullish in Twitter’.

Besides the caveat that the UK businesses that are so bullish are the ones that are actually already using it, there’s a little bit of interesting info in it.

Apparently 62% of UK businesses are using Twitter purely as a branding exercise, with 33% combining branding and sales, and 15% using it purely for sales (They might want to take a look at Dell making millions on Twitter for starters).

But then it goes on to reveal that just 14% of the businesses are tweeting daily, and 21% weekly. Which leaves 65% posting a monthly message or less – should that even count as a business using Twitter?

So there’s no surprise that 84% don’t think they’ve achieved a return on investment so far – but strangely more businesses would be willing to pay for ‘additional business functionality’ at 22%, than have actually claimed a return on investment (16%).

So maybe a better headline and summary would be that UK businesses are still mightily confused when it comes to Twitter. Some of them want more functionality despite not seeing any returns, and many of them claim they’re using it when they might log in less than 12 times a year.

They haven’t so much missed the point as built a dual carriageway bypass around it.

If you’re starting to use Twitter on behalf of your business, you need to have a quick think about what it is you’re looking to achieve and how it benefits your business – getting messages out there is somewhat useful in itself, but generally it’s expected that you might look at the rate of acquisition from a source, and the investment of resource it’s taken, and then weigh that against other sources of visitors/buyers/purchases.

Then you can not only determine the true level of ROI, but also potentially justify actually engaging on a regular basis and utilising Twitter as both a customer acquisition channel – but also as a customer retention channel. While new customers are great, it’s more cost effective to retain a current customer by increasing loyalty – and although you might need to interact and ask questions on at least a weekly basis, the amount of loyalty and customer service you can action can be measured as a definite return.

I suspect you could perform the same poll with most of the common tools – email, Facebook, Myspace etc, and you’d probably get similar results, because the same people have signed up without a plan after seeing the buzz, dabbled a little, and have no idea what they’re doing next.

Which means that there are big opportunities if you’re reading blogs like this, using Twitter on a regular basis and developing or following a clear plan with a decent amount of ROI.

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.

It’s not exactly engagement or interaction, but women’s online publishing and advertising network Glam has been using a widget which allows manual editing of the Twitter feed around an event to ensure the content is suitable for advertisers (From Venturebeat).

The widget is available throughout the Glam network, and to third-party publishers, who receive a cut of any revenue. And soon even publishers outside the network will be able to receive micropayments via Paypal.

It’s a traditional model, but one which appears to have worked, at least for the #Oscars.

But it suffers from the traditional problem of display advertising – in which the amount of eyeballs doesn’t always translate to the amount of people actively clicking on an advert. Although the sponsorship in this case was for a skincare company, which is likely to appeal to a female-targetted content network, would positioning it next to Oscar content give it relevancy or credibility?

And what does it mean for people who use Twitter hashtags without the knowledge that another party may profit from them?

After all, they were originally used to collate information for aggregating information about fires in San Diego, and have since been used for collating conversation around disasters like #Mumbai along with mainstream entertainment and sporting events.

It raises the eternal content question of the internet – should aggregators be able to collect all the revenue without compensating the content creators?

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?

Could the current financial situation force Twitter to start monetising microblogging with a newfound urgency?

Yes?

• Within the $20 million in VC funding, there is bound to be an element feeling a little twitchy at the moment.
• Would anyone buy a service for the valuations Twitter has had, without a working financial model?

No?

• $20 million can go a long way, if you’re careful!
• If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg is being honest that the social network is concentrating on growth over revenue for three more years, then as the pre-eminent microblogging site, Twitter could follow a similar plan. The only flaw is that Facebook is already making money, just not as much as it could!

These are some initial thoughts, so it would be great to hear some opinions and ideas! Personally I think that we may see some of the smaller microblogging sites, perhaps Plurk for example, need to find revenue generation before Twitter, simply due to the lack of funding reserves. Twitter has the advantage of being able to sit back, and perhaps see some of the experimentation take place before acting.

Two websites are currently showing the way the microblogging format can be used outside of pure conversation. But although the pair even have similar names, they take totally different approaches. I’ve previously covered ‘Twitter radio’ Blip.fm, but somehow I’ve neglected to cover the other major twist on microblogging, Blippr.  (You can find me using it, here)

But what is interesting about the system is that it not only allows for 160 character reviews of entertainment (music, films, books, videogames), but the focus of the company behind it is concentrated more on the recommendation side of things than purely Twitter for reviews, which means they’re taking on some big names (Disclosure: It also means they play in a similar space to ditto.net, which I do some work with).

What is Blippr in 140 char?

(Jonathan): A community of people looking to discuss, discover and organize books, games, movies and music. In 160 characters or less, of course.

Your company (Tag Team Interactive) has a focus on social relationships and recommendations – what inspired this philosophy?

(Jonathan): My business partner and I just know and see the value in personal recommendations–the ones you receive from your family, your close friends, even just acquaintances. There’s an explicit amount of trust that you extend those influences in your life and you don’t need to come to understand. Recommendations across other platforms, like Amazon or Netflix for example, take time to train and come to trust. There’s this sort of “black box” effect. You’re not sure exactly why the item they’re recommending is a fit for you. However, if your good friend said “You have to see Pineapple Express, it’s hilarious”, it doesn’t require the same amount of learned trust. You already know you can trust that person. It causes even that much more drive to go out and see that movie.

Your company website mentions Blippr is your second application, but what was the first? Was it related to Blippr, and did your previous applications and websites have a direct effect on how Blippr was created?

(Jonathan): Our first was Judge-O-Rama, a site focused on enabling people to resolve their conflicts and contests in a head-to-head context. We like to think of it as our “practice app.” It was just something fun and entertaining, not quite as useful or focused as blippr. Judge-O-Rama was definitely instrumental in our working together, though, and at least serving as the inspiration to us starting to work together. In terms of how this served in blippr’s creation, I think this blog post will give you a good idea of how blippr started.

Who do you see as your competitors? Does it include Blip.fm? What are the advantages of Blippr?

(Jonathan): We don’t view Blip.fm as a direct competitor, per se. They’re doing the micro-thing, but we’re not trying to create a me-too “Twitter for reviews” application. That’s the obvious connotation most people make, given the review constraints, but we’re far more focused on developing the social recommendation and organization pieces than we are a simple micro-review platform. As such, we view our competitors more along the lines of Flixster, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, iLike, Trusted Opinion, and a few others. Obviously one of our key advantages is our focus on not just one particular entertainment categories–movies or books or music or games–but on all of the above (we also plan on adding TV in the future). Furthermore, I think if you look at most of those sites, while they have solid communities, we’ve tried to make the participation process as simple as possible to encourage more participation. Also, last but not least, I would say that our focus on integrating with as many platforms as possible is a big differentiator. You can connect your blippr account with Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca, Tumblr, Facebook, Last.fm, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon, and others, which is obviously a great opportunity for our users’ opinions and reviews. Those are some of the high level advantages, at least.

Obviously you’re monetising the site through Amazon, but do you have any further plans to drive revenue you can disclose? With traffic growing, was it a conscious decision not to include display advertising?

(Jonathan): We would say that commerce through various sites will definitely be a large share of revenue, but we do intend on eventually displaying ads that are relevant to blipprs’ userbase, as well. Obviously, the primary intent there is to offer entertainment advertisers a place to capture people who truly are interested in entertainment media and looking to make a decision. But we very much aim to make it a value-add to users first, then advertisers. Jeremy Liew, of Lightspeed Venture Partners, wrote a great blog post a while back on the topic of endemic advertising, which I believe really showcases blippr’s revenue opportunity.

Blippr users can cross-publish to Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku and Pownce. Do your users tie into the audience figures for those sites, or has there been any surprises? And is that the main word of mouth that is driving new registrations?

(Jonathan): This is assuredly a large driver of how people are discovering blippr, but I wouldn’t say that’s the main word of mouth driving registrations. Email invites sent from users have also been a large driver. In terms of surprises, I wouldn’t say there have been too many. Most connections have been with Twitter and Facebook. The rest are pretty much equally spread.

Are there any of the cross-publishing sites which are easier or harder to integrate into?

(Jonathan) That would be a question for my co-founder and business partner, Chief Executive Geek, Chris Heald. Some have taken more time than others. Obviously Facebook takes far more time than any of the others due to building an application for the platform, which is much more than just a cross-publish opportunity. iPhone and OpenSocial integrations will be the next difficult pieces for us, but they are coming.

Does scaling prove as problematic for Blippr as it has done for Twitter? There seem to have been some timeouts recently when I’ve been using Blippr?

(Chris): I don’t think scaling is going to be anywhere near the problem for us that it has been for Twitter; our architecture and product design is a good deal different than Twitter’s, so we avoid many of the specific design issues that they’ve had problems scaling. We have had some timeouts lately, but those were due to some rather exceptional circumstances, and a lack of hardware to fail over gracefully to (in those cases, the problems weren’t scaling issues so much as our primary app server going down without a graceful failover – that’s since been corrected). We’re still getting this thing off the ground, so our infrastructure is very much in its infancy (though we’ve been working lately to address that!). However, we have built this thing with an eye towards scaling, and don’t foresee any major problems in doing so as we move forward. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, but we’ve worked very hard to build a flexible product, and hope to see it grow about as quickly as we can keep up with it!

Do you plan to focus on utilising a microblogging format as the logical mechanism for your relationship and recommendation applications?

(Jonathan): The main inputs for our recommendations are explicit relationships (who you follow), agreements with other peoples’ blips, and the ratings you give titles. (Chris): I don’t think the microblogging format could necessarily be described as the mechanism for our relational/recommendation tools – the other data we’re collecting drives that – but the microblogging format uniquely contributes to this aim in that it encourages extremely high levels of participation, and thus, results in more useful data being present in the system for us to draw conclusions from. It is absolutely a key component to the success of these other components that we have built, even if it isn’t the primary mechanism by which these processes work. Whether we’d use it in future similar applications, I can’t say, but we’re both big fans of the behaviors that it encourages, and would very likely consider it.

And are there any Blips on products which have really shocked, surprised or amused you?

(Jonathan): Good question. It’s hard to pare down to just a single blip or two. Seriously, I can say that I am the biggest fan of blippr. As a huge movie geek myself, I’m constantly reading through blips and finding myself agreeing, laughing, vehemently disagreeing, and more. While some people fault blippr’s micro-format and say that you can’t really know whether something is good or bad within 160 characters, I say, read for yourself. You’ll be surprised!