There's a lot of chatter on Twitter this morning about Be-A-Magpie, a service that will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.
According to TechCrunch, advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular advertisers. The service auto-determines the number of ads to insert per legitimate Twitter message - the default is one ad for every five tweets. The service inserts the ads automatically by storing your Twitter credentials.
According to TechCrunch, advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular advertisers. The service auto-determines the number of ads to insert per legitimate Twitter message - the default is one ad for every five tweets. The service inserts the ads automatically by storing your Twitter credentials.
The TechCrunch Twitter account, with 31,000 followers, can earn a whopping €14,410.51 per month. By comparison, my Twitter account can earn a paltry €149.11 per month.
However, there has been a lot backlash against the service. One of the main reasons seems to be that Be-A-Magpie is aginast the ethos that the twitter community has created, namely to share what's interesting to you at that moment, not what someone has paid you to share with others.
As for disclosure, a #magpie hashtag is added to each Tweet. You can also see who has signed up for the service already as Be-A-Magpie are seeding messages through Twitter to get more people signed up, as this photo from TechCrunch shows:
Scobleiser has started an interesting disucssion over on FriendFeed which discusses whether Be-A-Magpie should be banned from Twitter. A lot of people are saying that they will unfollow anyone who starts using the service as it is considered spam.
My favourite comment comes from Enrique Gutierrez:
No doubt @Ev and the others from Twitter will be taking a close look at the service and whether it should be allowed on Twitter. Their terms and conditons don't prohibit this kind of service, but if the backlash continues, it may well be worth their time to amend its terms.
"Social Media is about sharing interesting things with people who find those things interesting, not about soapboxing crap and spamming others with random junk. Magpie is a service that doesn't understand that, and though it attempts (poorly) at doing some level of justice to spamming, it's still spam/ads and unwelcomed in my book"
Jeremiah Owyang gives his take on the service here. Neville Hobson also gives his take on what Twitter with ads might look like, which explores some of the issues around advertising on Twitter, although the post doesn't look specifically at Be-A-Magpie.
I won't be using the service, but it will be interesting to see who does from those I follow. Although, if they do subscribe to Be-A-Magpie, I for one won't be following them for much longer.
5 comments:
What if - and this is only a what if - users could choose which adverts they posted? If I was going to post "Check out the latest Monty Python vid on YouTube" anyway and magpie were offering to pay for that... why not?
Would twitter have the power to ban it?
Are you sure you're not just bitter because TechCrunch's account is worth more than yours?
Me? €35. Not bitter in the least.
@Terence - Good point, If users where going to link to what is in the advert anyway then a customisable advert sounds ok.
But I think it would still be tainted by commercial aspect of clicking through on someone's link.
Wouldn't people also be tempted to post more of these advertising tweets as they are getting paid?
@Adam - Yes, they probably could argue that it counts as spam and moderate their terms accordingly. Alternatively, they could let the service run its course and if people lose a lot of followers ad therefore stop using the service, then it will become unsustainable and close.
Though if people continue to follow others even though there are magpie tweets interspersed with genuine ones, they will shed those who don't really want to see what they are tweeting about and end up with a more interested and engaged set of followers.
@JP - Earning close to €15,000 per month for tweeting would mean I could retire!
I don't think that Twitter will have to ban the ads though. As you say, when people find themselves haemorrhaging followers after signing up they’ll quickly leave the service.
The idea of being to customise your ads is interesting, but I’m not sure they’re ever going to succeed appearing in peoples feeds. If the service was me to choose, within reason, banner ads to appear on my twitter feed, this may be of interest, but for it to appear on other people’s threads because it’s featured in my feed, I’m not comfortable with.
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