Today I came across a blog post about Twittad, a way to make money off your twitter profile. The jist of the service seems to be that you sell the background of your profile to an advertiser.
I’m pretty interested in this idea for a few reasons (and no, not interested because I think it’s a good idea).
From the perspective of an advertiser:
As a frequent twitterer, I can’t say that I visit people’s profile pages very often at all. Instead, I use twhirl on my laptop, and twitterific and twinkle on my iPhone. So I’m curious about how much traffic a profile page is likely to garner. How many eyeballs would an ad really get?
Branding the background of the page means that an advertiser can add a graphic, but no links. This means a profile viewer can’t simply click an ad to visit your site, he must type the URL in directly. I can only assume that this would result in fewer visitors than a standard clickable ad would elsewhere.
However, we have no way of knowing. Currently there are no metrics available on twitter profiles views, and without clickable links, click-throughs obviously can’t be tracked. How does an advertiser know if his ad was effective? There doesn’t appear to be any way to calculate the ROI or effectiveness.
Is the investment worth it for an advertiser? It’s hard to say. Certainly it’s not a large investment (some of the going rates are $5), but many of the twits willing to accept advertising aren’t exactly highly followed.
From the perspective of a twit:
I will admit, I haven’t done anything to modify the default display of either of my twitter feeds. Both @afhill and @afhill262 are basically twitter-branded. However, if I were to change the overall feel of the profile pages, I would want them to promote my personal brand, not that of an advertiser. Obviously it would depend on the objective of your twitter account.
I often recall a comment made by Marsha Collier at iCitizen last May. She said that she doesn’t have adWords on her site because she views her personal brand integrity as more important than the income she could make off advertising.
I’ve already questioned how often a profile page is viewed anyway, so I don’t want to make too much of a case for not diluting the brand by placing an ad on this page. At the same time, is it worth putting an ad on your profile for a couple lousy bucks? Particularly in light of the fact that you don’t actually get paid until you have $20 in your account?
I know that there’s been an unofficial race to figure out how to many money off twitter. I’m just not sure this is it. And without metrics or tracking associated with the program, we’re not likely to find out.
Edit: After a response by the CEO of TwittAd, I started thinking about how some level of measurement could be achieved. If TwittAd serves up the background ads, they could use their own metrics packages to determine how often the ads are served up. That could potentially even allow them to shift their offerings from time- to impression-based. As well, educating advertisers on using a custom URL in the ads could help to identify which visitors were coming as a result of viewing twittAds. It’s an inexact science to be sure, but there may be ways to come up with some means to measure the impact of the investment..
I agree that this probably isn’t “it” when it comes to how to make money off of Twitter. But, there are a couple of other angles to come at this from.
When it comes to Adsense on your own site, there is some potential value to your readers. They should be able to tell that these are sponsored links, but the links displaying are based on the content on your site, right? So, the idea is that they’re relevant. Twittad is much older school advertising, I think — advertisers pick where they want to advertise, and that’s probably driven more by the number of followers or geographic location of the tweeter than the relevance of their tweets. That, as you pointed out, is a problem, as I don’t think profiles get many views (I tend to look at profiles in Tweetdeck when I do look at them…and that doesn’t include background images).
If you turned it around and made Twitter advertising more of an endorsement/testimonial, it might make more sense. For instance, if @afhill26 advertised a particular brand of running shoe, or if @tgwilson advertised Eloqua. In that situation, though, you’d almost want another profile section: “Products I endorse.” Which, of course gets to your point about…
Measuring effectiveness. I agree that, given Twitter’s current setup, getting a visitor a clickable link is next to impossible, and measuring that is even tougher. Now, if the advertiser set up custom landing pages for Twittad clickthroughs, then there would both be some measurability *and* some relevant messaging, potentially (e.g., @conniereece has a landing page for her Twitter profile link — different application, but that sort of approach could make things better).
Certainly, the idea of paid endorsements or related ads being served up makes some sense. The other day, the cherp blog had a post about recommendations. While their post was about recommending other twits, I think it could be interesting to have some sort of semantic mining to surface products or services you may be interested.
For example, my good friend Keith Baker (@ikeif) has had recent frustrations with dreamhost and cscc that he’s tweeted about. What if he could be served up ads for alternative services as a result? Now that would be interesting from an advertiser standpoint, although it doesn’t put dollars in the twit’s pocket.
This isn’t the first service to do something similar (of course, now I can’t find it, but it added a banner to the top of your site in regards to twitter as well).
I’m with you - it’s interesting, but not viable. It requires you to look at profiles, and for those ads to be progressive enough to encourage you to actually want to visit the site (by *gasp* typing in a URL!).
The best uses of profiles I’ve seen have been people adding in a “personal brand card” with links to their linkedin/myspace/facebook profiles. Some people actually have received job offers through the paths people made from twitter to linkedin (one I know of, personally).
It’s a tool, people are bound to try and monetize it, but with its current model, I don’t think “background ads” are the way. It’s obvious spam isn’t, either.
*brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
as you know, I have a strong aversion to ANY type in a background image, so that also colours my impression of this service!
Andrea,
Thanks for the write up on Twittad. You bring up some very good points about Twittad and the service it provides for both Twitter users and Advertisers.
It is my belief that Twitter will begin to evolve their users pages into more of a social network. I do not believe that they will go complete Facebook on us, but in order for them to monetize the site in someway, they will need to make their users pages interactive.
Allowing us (by us I mean Twitter users) to upload applications, upload photos and allow promotion of the individual, the metrics of a users Twitter page will then become available. I am sure Twitter knows how many people visit your profile page on Twitter..but as of today they dont release that information.
Our goal at Twittad is to setup a advertising network that rewards the Twitter user with a revenue share program. We are working hard to make changes to the site, including taking the intial steps of working with Twellow.com to grab their API to place Twittad users into specific categories. This will allow the advertisers to find Twitter users based on demographics.
Once we get that piece built, and a few other pieces in place we hope to have a good ad platform so it makes sense for Twitter to open up the profile pages into the HTML format. (then we can track clicks on a ad for the advertiser)
Thanks again for the write up- and stay tuned! We have some exciting things in the pipeline.
Regards,
James Eliason
President/CEO Twittad.com
I’ll be excited to see how you work to help offer advertisers means other than just via followers or updates to find profiles to advertise on-working with twellow seems to make some sense.
I do think that for companies to invest in this sort of advertising in the long term, there will need to be some means for them to measure ROI.
If you are currently monitoring the presence of the ads by ensuring the ad is being served up using your own ad hosting and log files, that could help to report back how often it’s being viewed. That could be a way for you to at least be able to give advertisers some numbers on how often their ad is being viewed.. and potentially gives you a means to sell ads per impression rather than by time. And, you could instruct advertisers to use a custom URL in their ads so that they may have some idea about who’s coming from those ads..
Best of luck as you navigate these waters!
Twitter ultimately has the key for the stats of a individual page within Twitter. It is our hope that they will see the growth of Twittad and find that many within their community are excited about this as a means of advertisement and revenue sharing.
We launched on August 26th and we already have almost 650 Twitter users signed up from all over the world and 50 advertisers on board.
Thanks!