Like much-criticized PayPerPost for blogs, German/UK startup Be-A-Mapgpie will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.
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 TechCrunch Twitter account, with 31,000 followers, can earn a whopping €14,410.51 per month, it says.
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. As for disclosure – well, there really isn’t any. A #magpie hashtag is added to each Tweet, but that’s it.
It’s not clear if Twitter will object to this. Their terms and conditions don’t specifically exclude it, but an amendment may be in order. There is a good discussion here, started by Robert Scoble, on whether it should be banned.
Users may not be so forgiving though. I imagine anyone who starts to use this will see a sudden decline in followers rather quickly.
You can tell who’s already signed up for the service – the company is using those accounts to spread word about itself virally:
Update: Credit where it’s due: Ben Kessler appears to be the first to call PayPerPost on Be-A-Magpie.
It’s a decision to make for us Twitter users. It’s not really a good habit to monetize your relationships. This is a nice idea but it’s negative effects could not be denied.
just as it’s a decision for followers to leave once their trust has been broken in this way.
It’s a problem for Twitter to sort out. I’m all for free speech but product placement is cheap.
hey michael i have something for you…last week they got into your crunchbase and emailed each company there!
i have the proof if you want it..
How about if it were made a reciprocal model? So I get ads from you if you get ads from me. It maintains trust, creates a permission-based marketing and advertising channel (very VRM), removes the shame factor in having commercial messages going out in your tweet stream, and would mean little chance of a big backlash (although might mean slower initial growth; or maybe not). I bet loads of people would opt-in over time, particularly if the ads were of reasonable quality and relevance. And I guess if the ratios are maintained at an acceptable level then you won’t get overwhelmed, although maybe there should be an aggregate cap on the number of ads that you can get over a given period. It’s not that dissimilar to having ads in RSS feeds, although personal communication (even if it is microblogging) is obviously different from regular publishing.
What do you think Mike? Or would even that be unacceptable to you? Could be the start of permission-based advertising. Maybe the recipient could even specify the type of commercial messages they’re prepared to see. Hmmmm.
How many of the 32,000 are bloggers. It seems like a lot of your traffic here and elsewhere are from people that are trying to make money with content, which I think creates a pretty tainted segment for advertisers.
I did feel a tinge of guilt after having read your comment, lol
I must confess that I’m one of the culprits whom you have so indelicately labelled as “relationship monetizers”. It’s not wrong to earn side income in legitimate ways (never before possible) brought about by developments in the online world. But that being said, I agree with you that it is not right to use relationships/connections (online or offline) for negative purposes. It’s not difficult to be an ethical viral marketer as long as you do not attempt to mislead readers/friends via untrue product advertising
Would you really leave this service though if it was monetized?
It’s our decision to make, but it’s interesting to watch the Twitter community as a whole come together to debate a service like this in such a public way. We’ve all become the gatekeepers for Twitter, and it’s our job to continue shaping it into the tool that we as a community want it to be. Plus, as seen by the very active and strong discussions that have come from this issue, there are strong and valid opinions on both sides of the argument, and it’s definitely something that will be debated about for a while to come before a revenue model or two emerge as the clear winners.
For me, it comes down to the format of the ads, and the way that they integrates into the conversation: http://thefutur...-network-fails/
I’m not against the monetization of Twitter, but I think that it has to be done carefully so as to not destroy the value of the service. The main reason that I don’t like Magpie is that it replaces useful/valuable content with an ad, and then makes you filter through those ads by hand. (And it’s going to get worse as users can self-select their ad identification, or even remove it all together.) Even with the hash tag, Magpie ads blend in with other content and make it difficult to pick out and ignore. On the other hand, a revenue model where you sell the background to your Twitter page still delivers impressions, but it doesn’t disrupt the value of the conversation.
Similar to how (most) blogs don’t just write about things they’re paid to write about, and instead leave the advertisements to banners that surround the valuable content, I see this as the ideal.
I also strongly agree with Scoble that Magpie shouldn’t be profiting from the work and infrastructure that Twitter has established without giving anything back to them in return.
In the end, after watching countless forms of communication get devalued by the flood of spam that inevitably takes them over, I guess I just want to keep Twitter as pure as possible, and force the advertisers to get a little more creative with their advertising than just taking their old tricks (text link ads) and applying them to new dogs.
Building relationships and loyal followers is much more valuable.
You would think so yes but it’s amazing the frequency that successful companies forget that simple fact.
Completely agree. Building relationships requires persistent work – and brings win-win value.
Inserting such ads requires nothing – it brings at most win-lose value and leaves ugly impression.
Hi,
are you italian?
Nice to meet you
have a nice day
Ines
I agree with you and I actually don’t like this approach.
What’s next? Inserting ads in one of every three Disqus comments?
#magpie Buy Kellogg’s Raisin Bran – 2 Scoops of Raisins in Every Box
While its easy to come out and bash this, I just want to take a look at it from another viewpoint, since afterall, Twitter does need to find a business model at some point. This may be a great experiment to learn from.
Will people stop following their own friends, celebrities, colleagues, and generally interesting people if they generally provide valuable Twitter posts, and have a sprinkle of ads every know and then?
Seems to me it will all depend on how relevant the ads can be to the person, and their followers. A tall order indeed.
at the VERY least it needs to be clearly marked as an advertisement, which it isn’t.
Agreed, and not to be off topic, but since you AND Scoble are hanging around here, I wrote a post up today detailing both your arguments on Google’s Wiki-search features, and added my opinions from my usability background standpoint.
http://www.ianm...e-features.html
Will do a post on Magpie tomorrow, from a usability perspective again.
thanks. I’ll check it out. I have a lot more to say on this but will probably wait til the Thanksgiving break when I can take a breathe.
we marked the magpie-tweets using the #magpie hashtag but have moved to allow users define their own disclaimer. I’ve posted a longer comment below. would love to get more feedback!
We discussed this on FriendFeed tonight. Got a ton of commentary: http://friendfe...If-I-were-ev-I/
yeah, good resource. added a link in the post.
It’s 3AM, and there are embarrassing typos in that above comment. Goodnight.
I personally think it’s vile to make money on top of someone else’s infrastructure without sharing the wealth with the folks who are paying the servers and such. If I were Twitter I’d block everyone using these kinds of services until I turned on my own monetization scheme.
meh, I don’t agree with that. But I do think it clearly breaks follower trust.
In that case, do you mind if I leave a Seagate advertisement on every comment thread here?
umm…
What about apps like twitterific and others that are making money off of twitter and not sharing?
I definitely wouldn’t want ads in tweets from my friends but if someone else can figure out how to monetize tweets before twitter does I say rock on!
thinkjose: that’s slightly different because at least there those services added some real value to Twitter itself. Also, I haven’t seen any of those force Twitter to host the ads themselves, while Magpie definitely is using Twitter to host the ads themselves. That makes the two things completely separate. It’s sort of like the fact that my blog has ads and I got a link here from Mike, but I’m not forcing Mike to host the ads on his own infrastructure.
scoble- I agree they are different and I am not a fan of someone else having complete control over my channel and content. It would be similar to having magpie write a post for your blog that was an ad. Although according to Jan (magpie CEO) it looks like they are giving the user more control over which ads, how often, disclaimer, etc.
Creative for sure but may not be the best way to monetize your followers. Besides monetizing your followers just sounds dirty anyways.
thanks for pointing this out, robert. we didn’t come up with a means of calculating who much is owed to Twitter for each magpie-tweet, but we aren’t against them having their share. it’s only fair as they provide a great platform.
however, the biggest share of the magpie revenue is on the side of those using magpie. they provide a real service to their followers. magpie tries to help them be rewarded.
(i’m the ceo of magpie & friends ltd., a longer comment is below)
of course, that should read “how much” rather than “who much”
I think the ‘right thing’ to have done would have been to approach twitter with this idea first, then release it to the masses for their “rewards”
On the other hand, I’d pay Twitter $10 a month to unfollow anyone who tried doing a Magpie advertisement to me. Maybe THAT is how Twitter will make money with this stuff!
Twitter, the innovative pay-to-opt-out service.
If I have to pay a couple of bucks a month to keep Twitter ad free but let them keep providing the service… I can see the value in that.
Cluttering up the stream with adverts (especially served by random third parties with no benefit to Twitter) would quite quickly make it a much less pleasant experience
I stopped listening to Clear Channel because of the adverts. I avoid commercial TV (in favor of on-demand) because of the adverts. Facebook and MySpace are too fragmented. Twitter is clean and efficient and the noise is what I choose to follow. Unless the ads are unobtrusive and really well targeted (or suppressed) it would be a mistake
I don’t think this will take off.
I think the contextual matching is going to be hard to get working even reasonably right. The challenge is that tweets are short and even if you have many of them, it’s hard to find the right patterns to try and match-up advertisers.
That, and if there is a #hashtag, it’s going to be easy for people to just filter out the ads (if the site takes off, most of the twitter clients can probably add this filtering as an option).
I’ll unfollow as soon as I see it. Want to monetize your blog? Fantastic. There’s already enough noise out there, this kind of crapola is rediculous.
Paypertweet? Good luck with that!
Anyone else think its curious that Magpie states:
“We are Magpie & Friends Ltd., based in Great Britain and we have our main offices in Germany.”
Based in one country, but the main office is in another?
At least the PayPal fees are on them, they say. They seem to have thought a lot of hurdles and possible road blocks through already though, and look pretty well organized as far as the website goes. They put up a good storefront, I wonder who runs the shop.
It’s a german company using the english Limited business model (LTD). UK office is probably a mailbox-only addresse? LTDs need 1 Pound of capital while you need 25.000 EUR in Germany to start a limited business.
Thanks for the info, good to know!
I’m 100% with Robert Scoble on this one – It’s ‘cheap’ to use Twitter’s infrastructure to sell ads, without paying the Twitter guys.
Michael’s point about the ads being served without being clearly marked as ads is another reason why this ‘feels’ all wrong to me.
This comment was sponsored by….. Just kidding
Best way to lose followers ever! #magpie
Agreed. I can’t wait to see someone try the service, and lose half their following in 3 days flat.
initial reaction. i no like.
actually, why doesn’t twitter do this already? they’ve added enough value to me that i wouldn’t mind them serving up ads in my timeline — err, within reason. not sure what that magic number is. 1 every 25 tweets maybe? 1 in 5 that magpie defaults too is just spammy.
here’s a biz model for twitter. more an enterprise solution maybe. give me the ability to create a page like what they did for election.twitter.com for my china biz community on here. if they offered companies, brands that format i think serious money would be paid for that. just sayin’
Christine – have you looked at yammer.com? We use it as an internal twitter in my company.
Christine:
Another option for an internal company Twitter-like service is Intridea’s Present.ly.
is there any eligibility bar for twitter profiles?
I signed up for it and then canceled it. I and am sure others would monetize twitter if they’d come up with a business model or be more stable in it’s reliability if it’d happen. $10/mo or something similar. It the twitter affiliate program I guess..
Can’t Firefox’ plugin Adblock fix this problem? It just has to filter for the #hashtag.
I want my tweets to be MY words directly from ME. Until Magpie “tweets” are clearly marked as advertisement, I won’t be joining.
Do it to me and I’ll take you off the list of people I follow
One or two people I follow doing it would be okay – I know you need to pay for lunch but if all the people I followed did it that could add a lot of spam.
I think the people will decide anyway so Magpie will live or die depending whether it fits in with peoples Tweeting habits. If I was Twitter I would be watching these developments with interest and then coming in later, it’s like free R&D.
Controversial. Interesting. I like it. Ev needs to add this feature and regulate it before it is too late. Now that people have figured out how to compromise Twitter what happens now?
So everyone wants everything for free is the basic comment train here. I like it as it shows the guys at twitter a business model along the lines of which I am sure they are working.
We must see a twitter business model in early 2009 and I am sure it will be similar or maybe a premium twitter account along the lines of Jason Calacanis suggestion.
Pat: come on, this is not ethical business practices you are condoning here. Can I come over and use your servers to build my business just to show you how to monetize? Really? Please.
Robert you’re more than welcome
we could do with all the help we can get
I still maintain that this will just alienate your followers. Unfortunately Twitter is so good because there is no advertising, I really feel that it will struggle to find a definite way to monetize its service.
I can’t begin to imagine my reaction when I see an advert popping up every five minutes on my TwitterFox.
Plus there is also the risk of a ‘new twitter’ coming along and offering the service for free again. So it is a tough one for sure.
David
http://www.from-the-couch.com
My though about Be-a-Magpie is here:
http://justtalk...from-ad-tweets/
It’s not always bad and Twitter guys can learn something, I suppose.
Analyzing keywords for potential interests isn’t enough. For a service like this to get any kind of acceptance with legitimate (and influential) users, I need to be able to select with extreme prejudice what gets posted and when. There are dozens of products and services that I evangelize just because I think they’re awesome, and it would be nice to get a kickback for doing what I’d be doing anyway. I never gave a crap about PayPerPost so I don’t know how close this is to their business model, but I do think there’s room for affiliate programs to be adapted to social networking.
I think this could be a way of losing trust and followers. You have no control over what they advertise. I like to know what I’m giving my name to.
I don’t think it’s a good idea either, but I could see this becoming popular on Twitter because of its user base (students, etc.) if it weren’t super intrusive and the advertisers were high quality. If it were those really low CPM ads like you see on Myspace banners, or ads put on blast, no way. Twitter could do this itself, probably. They shouldn’t let this company operate on their site without paying them regardless.
There are a lot of ways Twitter can make money. All will be disruptive to the user experience. I think their best bet is to think like a carrier and have value added services/features, at an extra, optional cost to users. Applications, premium services, etc. I think they could make money with retailers in some way – I’d be cool with opting in to get updates from retailer partners I like and want to hear from.
They need to do this kind of stuff stat, before it gets more infiltrated with marketers, etc.
Magpies are assholes, so the company name is fitting.
seriously, do a youtube search:
http://www.yout...feature=related
Dear Mike,
thanks for writing about Magpie and for sharing your feedback.
There has been quite some discussion about it lately with both negative and positive comments. We’ve tried to stay in the loop and we’ve learned a lot. After all, we’re still a very young company, but we’ve built a follower base of 600,000+ tweeps in only a month. So there are some people liking it.
Three major points have been addressed in yesterday’s update to Magpie:
- Pre-approval of ads. Tweeps can now pre-approve whether they want to air a specific magpie-tweet or not. Thus, users can move from mere ads to personal endorsements, if they like.
- Customizing the disclaimer. Mike, you also mention that ads weren’t clearly marked as such. We started by using #magpie as a disclaimer to both tell followers that this is not the Twitterer’s own tweet and to build our own brand a little. We’re allowing users now to use their own disclaimer like “ad” or “sponsored”. However, a lot of people (not referring to advertisers here) were asking to omit the disclaimer. We believe that, combined with pre-approval, this may as well be a way to go.
- Less frequent ads. We’ve always let people choose their tweet/ad-ratio but we didn’t allow really low amounts of ads. But as some people earn more than €50 (~ $63) per tweet, they’d be happy to have them come in less frequently. You can now choose to have as few ad 1 ad per 200 tweets.
I recognize that you don’t like the service as it is. I would love if you elaborated more on your objections, as this is the way we can improve the service.
In the end of the day, we believe that you don’t break your follower’s trust as you assumed before, Mike. Just as you, a lot of people are using Twitter to really provide a service to their followers. They’re breaking news, telling us what’s going on or are just making us laugh. As a blogger you can put up ads and be rewarded for what you do. As a Twitterer you should be as well, we think.
Again, I would love to hear more about why you don’t like Magpie and what we can do better!
Thanks again, kind regards,
Jan
CEO Magpie & Friends Ltd.
I think that there are tons of ways to monetize Twitter without resorting to advertising. I understand that straightforward advertising is what makes the social media world go round, but defaulting into that thinking is what cheapens its effect. I’m already so used to seeing ads integrated into my Facebook, and video sites with pre-rolls, bottom thirds, sidebars, and even (in 2008) pop-ups, that it would be an incredible move to see Twitter do something DIFFERENT and not risk alienating its users.
Obviously I don’t know the inner-workings of the company, but I don’t think this is too difficult. Here are two ideas off the top of my head:
1) Create branded company sites: for example, cnn.twitter.com, where any comment hashtagged with #cnn would go there, and CNN could post their tweets, foster discussions, and expand what Rick Sanchez does, using Tweets in his broadcasts. It could also work for companies, other news orgs, blogs, events, and so on. Imagine walking into an event and seeing a banner saying, “Tweet #eventname and check out eventname.twitter.com to see what other people are saying!”
2) Keep it as a free service who use it for personal tweeting. But, for accounts like @TechCrunch, @CNNbrk, and @Wordpress that are using Twitter for their business, tweeting blog posts, promoting products, and so on, make those companies pay for Twitter. Thus you would appeal to the majority of people who can use Twitter to stay in touch with friends and network connections for free, and charge the people who profit from using Twitter to spread their product (like TechCrunch).
Advertising is not the only solution, especially considering what is starting to look like a critical point of ad saturation on the web.
interesting
arrington complaining about pay per posts. hahahahhah bahhahah
Lots of people look on Twitter as a Microblogging platform
If 1/100 of Robert Scoble’s tweets is a Seagate advert, I would have no complaints, and he might spend more time on Twitter compared to Friendfeed, if Seagate paid $500 per advert.
It is very similar to Blog posts thanking sponsors which Techcrunch do every now and then, though occasionally they forget to add nofollow to the links.
With Twitter all links are nofollow, thus from a Google perspective there is no question of buying juice, it is purely influence and audience.
20 months ago I argued that there are ethical problems using Twitter for commercial use because there is no method to incude disclosure in 140 character which wouldn’t be extremely limiting.
http://andybear...siness-use.html
If they at least allowed people to enhance their profiles enough to include adequate disclosure about the type of content it would be a good first step.
I benefit from receiving twitter streams posted from blogs, but I look on every one of those tweets as being commercial – it is advertising the blog, which contains advertising.
In many cases feeding RSS to twitter has become the primary Twitter content, and initial use of Twitter for conversation has declined.
The Techcrunch twitter account for instance would in many ways be much more interesting without the 90%+ ? posts from Twitterfeed
Many blogs use a seperate Twitter account for feed posts, but that might reduce visibility of the fed posts… the “advertising”
I would certainly be more inclined to use a specific desktop app for Twitter if it included a method to filter out all twitterfeed posts.
There is a good chance a Greasemoney script to filter them out would also be popular, especially on a case by case basis.
Magpie isn’t the only way people are monetizing Twitter, I know tons of people who promote affiliate products, with or without disclosure. In some cases that might be breaking the affiliate network ToS, or laws in various regions (especially if it is promoting B2C in Europe)
I must admit whilst I am a supporter of high quality paid reviews with disclosure, I am not a huge fan of advertising as content.
That might seem one and the same thing but there is a huge difference.
If the sole purpose of a message I receive is the advertising, and there is no additional value, it is junk.
There is value in recommendation, so if someone I trust sends a message that a particular product is good, with an affiliate link, that still has value to me, even in a tweet.
A single message blasted by 1000s of Magpie users I have yet to see value in, because it is pure advertising, just like posts on blogs thanking sponsors.
Excellent points, Andy. Isn’t Calacanis running advertisements for Mahalo constantly on Twitter. Aren’t we all (who own websites/blogs) advertising for ourselves when we say, “check out this post on bla bla” on Twitter? What’s the difference between this and Magpie. Wait, I know the answer; the ad isn’t disclosed (even thought it should be obvious).
Also, I hope I’m not the only person who thinks the PayPerpost analogy is flawed. PPP pays you to post on web properties that YOU own.
My key thoughts on this:
1. I agree with Andy above, advertising as content, especially on Twitter doesn’t tickle my tastebuds.
2. CPM model not appropriate, twitter is about building niche audiences, should be CPC or CPA.
I wonder why twitter doesn’t do it by themselves. At some point they will need to monetize their service. What is @ev thinking?
So lets say the users (with less than 1000 followers) will have the option to pay $10 bucks a month or $50/year to have a “ad-free” twitter.
People with more follower will have to pay more… etc..
I’m a fan of sneaking-an-ad-with-a-service plan. With the keyword matching, why doesn’t Magpie try to turn this into a useful service? Instead of trying to keyword-match for advertisements, try matching us up with other, similar twitter users that we might like and include an ad in the process? Poor example perhaps, but hopefully my point was clear.
As for ads in twitter, was anyone discovered Niall Kennedy’s TwitterFE? While rewritting twitter for best “web practices” he included a Google Ad in Twitter’s sidebar. I thought this was very well done. Here’s an example of my twitterFE page:
http://www.twit...dimensionmedia/
I used Magpie services last week as an advertiser. I paid 10€ for a first trial. I had only 7 visitors thanks to this campaign. I can say that it’s too expensive and not efficient for the moment.
I have similar thoughts like Saad. Why doesn’t twitter place ads into twitter streams and offer two subscriptions: A free plan where you have to accept ads and another plan where you have to pay but get an ad-free twitter.
That would be an easy and fair business model.
Everyone must have seen this coming. This has to be a way forward – if it’s good enough for blogs and searches (re: Google ads) then it has to be good enough for Twitter. As unfair as it is that you get unsolicited ads, surely some of us are getting to the point where our use of twitter is SOOOOO valuable that we’re thinking they should be getting some payback?! Am i wrong?
However, due to real estate it is much much harder.
What about this as a halfway house ….
You come onto Twitter as company twitterer or personal twitterer. A company can tweet a blog post, product post or something. Twitter charges something for that.
Furthermore, people can follow specific company tweets or a general TwitterCompanyAds account and re-tweet things they find interesting and make some cash per visit.
That way you can moderate what goes out but you still make cash. You might want to KNOW Seagate has a new harddrive coming out – Seagate MAY want to tell everyone. Surely there is a halfway house?!
You can read some comments from Magpie’s CEO here on my company blog:
http://blogs.gc...-all-halloween/
John.
Leveraging your twitter followers who are your personal friends to sell ads is just wrong. It goes against the very basic human psychology of trust and friendship. Has anyone ever valued a friendship where they were feeling like they were being used?
You can leverage your popularity and mention your sponsor – like Scoble = Seagate – that’s cool by me. However there are a handful of Scoble’s out there and I don’t think anyone who has never met him really thinks they are good friends. You can follow him all day long and he may tweet back but would you count on him to help move a couch?
When you leverage a personal relationship to monetize then you do way more harm then any monetary gain you might receive. People who have a lot of close friends got them because they cultivated a trusting relationship and to threaten that is not worth the risk.
Cheers – Eric
Having tested Magpie, I did not find it to be an effective method of advertising. It’s crap to call for an outright ban on people who want to advertise on a new social platform with (all respect to Robert.)
If you don’t like that someone uses Magpie, or any service, don’t follow them. As Aira said at the start of this discussion, it should be left to the individual user to decide. In this economy, some form of advertisement should be considered.
I use twittad ( https://www.twittad.com/a/Ic ) Although there business model might not be as sound, it’s method is much less intrusive.
I’ve never had as many comments or hits as I did on my anti-magpie post http://tinyurl.com/5hzkvg – and I didn’t even mention that those accessing twitter via phone are paying for the text message to show them the advertisement.
Magpie is the wrong way to market on twitter. It shows a great lack of understanding of how the community works.
Yet another way that abusive tweeters are going to end up killing this service. Talk of monetization all you want, but in the end, that couple thousand a month extra will only end up discrediting your sincerity to your readership.
Great conversation. I invite you to check out my thoughts on advertising on Twitter. http://www.twit...d.wordpress.com
Regards,
James Eliason
Twittad.com Founder/CEO
Magpie beat us out of the gate, but we feel we have a much better offering. We’re hoping to launch in a few weeks.
The magpie concept is similar to out offering, though we built our service to be a benefit to the twitter community, and not a detriment.
Unlike magpie, we will offer advertisers and publishers full control of their ads, along with a honest depiction of what kind of money they can make for displaying ads.
Hang in there folks, we’re almost there…
I would be very OK if Twitter did this to monetize their own service. It’s their right, and I benefit tremendously from using Twitter. I’m much more uncomfortable with users monetizing their Tweets, beyond the normal promotion we all do with article links, etc. I’m more OK with Twittads, where you can place ads on your profile page, so when a person visits your page, like a blog, they see an ad. Not as agregious IMHO.
Thanks for this post, I too have noticed not the most positive reception for Magpie, in fact I polled my audience after testing the service and got a positive but mostly negative reaction
http://www.web-...lf-diminishing/
I did make $43 from one tweet however!