Another Company Builds a Business Model around Twitter – Marketplace for Twitter Ads

I wonder when Twitter will finally notice how many people come up with creative ways to use Twitter for business while Twitter keeps earning nothing at all off those millions of users participating in the micro-blogging community. Right now it looks like Twitter is determined to continue ignoring this same as it has been doing until now.

In the meanwhile today we are watching TwittAd covered on TechCrunch – and this will be sure to bring some initial visibility to the service. TwittAd is a marketplace to buy and sell ads on Twitter profiles. The idea is simple enough and almost makes sense: it works same as any ads marketplace helping bloggers sell ads if they are not able to reach potential advertisers directly.

So what TwittAd does is simply connecting a potential advertiser to an owner of a profile on Twitter and helping the profile owner sell an ad on his or her Twitter profile. The ads will be located in the normally empty left-hand column on your Twitter page. The ads served by TwittAds seem to be intended mostly for branding purposes as they don’t offer any links back to the advertiser’s site (unless the link is included in the image itself – but this can not be clicked anyway). TwittAds makes money by getting 5% commission on every ad sold.

After an advertiser makes a bid to place an ad on one of the Twitter profiles registered on the site (are we calling them Twitter publishers or twittershers here?), the publisher will have to approve the ad and manually upload the image to the profile layout. Probably this is the reason that I have only found two profiles sold (to the same advertiser actually) with already uploaded images.

The screenshot above also shows that advertisers risk not being noticed at all on the profiles if the profile owner chooses to abandon Twitter for a while: the latest user’s update is from 4 days ago about the profile sold on TwittAd.

I think some problems with TwittAd are obvious from the very beginning: first of all, it only takes the number of followers (along with the people you follow yourself) into account without paying attention to other factors, like frequency of updates, number of retweets you get from other users, or maybe page rank of your Twitter page. Unfortunately it is well-known that you can obtain a large number of followers by simply following multiple people and having some of them return the favor (it is not all that difficult to unfollow those that don’t so that you can continue adding new people and maintain a healthy follower/following ration) – but these people will not listen to you and will hardly ever land on your Twitter page again. Besides, it does not provide any targeting information to a potential advertiser since without any idea of what exactly you focus on in your tweets they will hardly be able to determine which audience they will reach via your account.

But the major problem with TwittAd is that it is not all that easy to sell ads on any online properties without relevant sales experience – even the best blog ads marketplaces face difficulties from time to time. And obviously this one is supposed to take a lot of persuasion to make potential advertisers believe they should have their brands exposed on Twitter at all.

Besides, knowing that the heaviest Twitter users rarely ever visit profiles of the people they follow instead using various desktop and mobile clients and checking their own timeline (which will not display any ads from other users), I can imagine potential advertisers will eventually figure out their ads don’t reach anyone but the twitter publishers themselves.

Anyway since I am pretty sure these ads will hardly have a chance of annoying anyone since they will mostly be visible to myself, I think I will run a small experiment here with TwittAd. I believe that with my current number of followers at a little over 1.5 thousand (and the existing pricing on the site other users expect to be paid by advertisers), $100 for a week of placing some ads along my profile (and all those incredibly clever thoughts of mine) sounds quite fair.

After I publish this post I will add myself as a publisher to TwittAds and will give it a month to see how it works (or if it works at all) to report the results here in one month. If I do earn anything from the experiment, I will use the entire amount to finance some micro-loans on Kiva to avoid any negative comments I may get about selling ads on my Twitter profile.