The rise of paid advertising on Twitter streams has been controversial in some areas online. Back in April 2009 I ran an experiment of placing Twitter ads through one Twitter advertising service (see post) but I’ve never known what it was like if you were running those sorts of ads on your Twitter account.

I’ve not signed up to run ads in my Twitter account, but I found someone who is. The person, who will remain anonymous, agreed to the following interview.

What motivated you to try Twitter advertising?

I will admit at first I was totally against the idea of ads in the Twitter stream but being a blogger I can’t really come out against something if I am not willing to at least try it and see if it is as bad as I imagined or as other people have. So I signed up for both Magpie and SponsoredTweets as an experiment to see what kind of reaction I would get from my followers and to see just what kind of money could be made.

What was the experience like in terms of sign up, ease of use? Do they automatically post tweets, or do you post them?

Signing up in both cases was incredibly easy. Under five minutes for both and you are away to the races. With Magpie there are some adjustments you can make as to how often ( 5 Tweets per ad is the default) and you can select which type of ad actions you can utilize, for example PPC ads. SponsoredTweets was far more basic with just a sign up and nothing more.

The tweets are published automatically. With Magpie if you go with the default after every 5 tweets the ad (if you have any in the queue) will automatically post itself. I believe it is the same with SponsoredTweets.

What sort of money do you get for the ad tweets?

Magpie is making me more money than AdSense from all my blogs combined. Even at my low follower count I am seeing a good return and that is only with my current ad rate of 60 cents per tweet. I know of a friends who is getting about a $1.50 per ad published to his Twitter stream. Then you have someone like Jeremy Shoemaker who is getting ridiculous rates of 4,500 for one tweet ad. Apparently he made around $75,000 from ads in his Twitter stream last month. So like anything on the web … your reputation and popularity will greatly affect what you make.

Has there been any negative reaction from your followers?

The only flack I received was when my Twitter stream was automatically getting pushed to Facebook. More than a few people made sarcastic comments regarding them. Since then I’ve stopped the auto publish of Twitter to Facebook and let my Twitter client handle it. As far as my Twitter followers, I can’t say that I lost any of them over doing this nor has there really been any verbal bugging about it.

Would you recommend it to others?

I think it boils down to the same question you have to ask when you are writing a blog. If you are doing it just for fun and to share stuff then no I don’t think it is worth it because you won’t be making serious money. You also run the risk of pissing off your followers because they are use to you doing this for fun and might think you are just trying to cash in for spare change.

However if you are utilizing Twitter as a part of your business then yes I would say it might very well be worth it but be careful and don’t get greedy by trying to push out the ads at a more frequent rate. I know with Magpie the minimum is 5 Tweets – 1 ad, and it goes up from there to a maximum of 200 tweets – 1 Ad. I would imagine that when your ad rate goes up to a nice figure you could always increase the number of tweets to be posted before the ad – giving your followers a break.

In perspective I have been using Magpie for almost two months but for the first month I was too restrictive on which type of ads would get pushed out and didn’t make a penny. Then after a chat with a friend using Magpie I made some adjustments and that is when I started seeing some money being made.

One point to remember – for people like myself with a combination of low follower count and lack of a “name” the ads I get are very similar in quality to AdSense ads or remnant ads that you get when you belong to an ad network. So for the most part don’t expect quality ads and don’t expect to make a lot of money. For most people it should be considered as just another slice of the pie not the whole thing.

To sign up to Be-A-Magpie, click here.

Interview with a Twitter User who runs Ad Tweets is a post from: The Inquisitr

Just to clarify one thing right off the bat so we don’t get started off on the wrong foot. I see nothing wrong at all with bloggers wanting to monetize their work, even to the point of using properly demarked sponsored posts. While other’s might factiously refer to this as evil and soulless while the very blog they work for does just that I think it should be left up to the individual blogger and his/her readers as to how evil it is.

That said I don’t agree with monetizing things like one’s Twitter stream. I have never been a fan of Magpie and I am even less of a fan of the soon to be launched Sponsored Tweets ad platform from Izea. Under the new program Twitter users who sign up for the ad network will get paid either on the number of clicks a sponsored link gets or by a flat fee per tweet.

The program is a natural extension of the company’s effort to find new ways for advertisers to connect with customers, he said. Izea has run "sponsored conversations" for many brands, including a recent campaign for Sea World and another for Kmart. In those instances, Izea advertisers pay for bloggers to create content about a product or service

Source: AdWeek

Now from a purely personal point of view I don’t think that stream of consciousness micro-blogging services should be used as an income generator. We are already seeing enough bastardization of the Twitterstream with the misuse of things like hashtags and Twitter-based games, we don’t need to have to start pulling our hair out over having to deal with sponsored tweets.

While it is inevitable that things like Magpie and the upcoming ad network from Izea happen it doesn’t mean that we have to like it, or agree with it. I think the whole idea stinks and like I said just because we can monetize out Twitterstreams it doesn’t mean that we should.

Just because you can monetize tweets doesn’t mean you should. is a post from: The Inquisitr

We use you to spread the wisdom of the crowd, to share our growing wealth of information and to fill the cyber biways with our mindless meanderings. Twitter has spawned a whole ecosphere of services that are totally reliant on the whether the blue bird of Twitter happiness is up to flying on any particular day. Through this all Twitter has existed and survived because of the tin cup held out to rich sugar daddies who let it willing share its services with the common folks for free.

Sure these sugar daddies are going to want to see the day when Twitter finally starts returning the favours and make them even richer but no-one seems to know how that is going to happen; even all these years later. That hasn’t stopped the common folk though from trying to take Twitter further down the alley and make a few bucks for themselves off of our favourite bird.

As Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins over at Mashable wrote yesterday there appears to be another bird who wants to join this communication love fest by letting us pimp out our Twitter feed. Apparently this service; going under the cutesy name of Magpie, will suck up your Twitter feed and spit back to you how much spare change your ego stroking is worth per month. You can tell Magpie how many times they can insert advertised based tweets into your Twitter stream; which of course will affect the amount of pocket change you make, but at least they will be kind enough to let us know it’s an ad by putting #magpie at the beginning of the tweet.

In all seriousness though I personally think this idea stinks for a couple of reasons. The first is that while we might try to monetize things like blogs and RSS feed I don’t necessarily agree that things like Twitter streams; or any microblogging nonsense, needs to be monetized. Hell IRC has been running since we could let two computers communicate and no-one ever thought to try and make money from it. Newsgroups have been around since before the Internet and no-one thought that they needed to monetize their daily conversations. That is because Twitter is even much more of a partyline type of communication than things like blogs. Twitter isn’t a matter of producing content – it is talking with friends.

Monetizing your Twitter stream for self gain is – to me – akin to trying to sell off your sister on the street corner for a few bucks to stuff in your back pocket. On the other side of the coin though I could see where this could be a good relationship between Twitter and its users if the in stream advertising was a co-operative deal between the user and Twitter. It would have to have very strong limits in place but I could see a shared ad revenue model for Twitter for in-stream ads where they get to pay back the sugar daddies and we get a few bucks to pay Starbucks with (or to donate to a worthy cause) – but only if we agree to it individually.

At this point though if I see Magpie tweets coming through on your stream – well – yer done – toast – unsubscribed from.

Pimping your Twitter feed is a post from: The Inquisitr