What's Your Tweet Worth? Um, . . . Nothing.

A month ago, I wrote about a company called TwittAd that lets you auction off ads on your Twitter page. Now, the company is sponsoring WhatsYourTweetWorth?, a vanity site where you enter your Twitter name, and it tells you how much your Tweets are worth based on how many followers you have. (Try it later, the site is down—probably being overwhelmed by people who are already Twittering about it). Before it went down, it said that TechCrunch, which has 26,361 followers, is worth $503 per month. Except that, it isn’t.

As I noted in my post on TwittAd:

The problem with placing ads on your Twitter page, though, is that ultimately you may just be advertising to yourself. I rarely go to the Twitter pages of people I follow. Their Tweets appear on my Twitter page (and my FriendFeed page, and my Thwirl client, and my Twinkle app on my iPhone). That’s why I follow people, so I can get their Tweets pushed to me. The only way ads are going to work on Twitter is if they are blended into the message stream and sent out as Tweets. But that would be annoying.

I’m sure that’s not going to stop everyone from a Twitter account checking ou thow much they are worth. Here’s a money-making idea TwittAd: Forget about trying to sell ads on Twitter pages, and put ads on WhatsYourTweetWorth instead. (Assuming they can get it to work again).