A lot of virtual ink is used in this Wall Street Journal article to describe Twitter to the few remaining people who don’t get it and to rehash info on Twitter’s recent funding, valuation and usage growth.
However, this bit hasn’t had much play in the media.
German start-up Magpie & Friends has started paying users for the right to sell ads in their tweets. The company uses an auction system in which potential advertisers bid on keywords they want to associate with their ads — like iPhone or NCAA.
Magpie looks for tweets about these topics among Twitter users who have signed up with it and, with permission, sends the winning bidders’ ads into those users’ message streams, to be seen by their followers. Advertisers typically pay from a few cents to around $13 per ad, and Magpie splits the proceeds with the user.
Are users endorsing products by sending promotional tweets through their personal Twitter account? How fast will they lose their followers if they do this? What kinds of companies will promote this way rather than building and using their own brand and account? This will be interesting to watch.