Twitter who has over 200 Million users, 50 Million of which log in daily, has quite a few celebrities. With many celebrities who have Millions of followers, the money that can be made from advertising is very enticing.

Now, advertising on the social network is nothing new. There’s services that allow anyone to sign up and send out tweets that make them a flat fee or so much per click. Celebrities on the other hand, thanks to Ad.ly, can make a pretty nice fee from advertising products or services.

New York Magazine shared some details about how much certain celebrities make from advertising and even more details can be read in their latest issue.

Via New York Magazine:

Twitter Celebrities Can Make Upwards Of $50,000 Advertising is a post from: The Inquisitr

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

Dell boasts over 600,000 followers- and is the 47th most followed account. @DellOutlet began posting in September of 2007, and frequently tweets about refurbs and other tantalizing promotions. Stefanie Nelson, who tweets the Dell Outlet postings, describes their success on a Dell blog:

“We’ve surpassed $2 million in revenue in terms of Dell Outlet sales, but we’re also seeing that it’s driving interest in new product as well. We’re seeing people come from @DellOutlet on Twitter into the Dell.com/outlet site, and then ultimately decide to purchase a new system from elsewhere on Dell.com. If we factor those new system purchases that come from @DellOutlet, we’re actually eclipsed $3 million in overall sales.”

Even at $3m, the Twitter-gotten revenue is paltry compared with Dell’s earnings of  $12.3 billion in Q1 of 2009.  But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a very favorable result in light of Twitter’s plan to eventually turn a profit by connecting corporations with social media savvy buyers.

Dell tweets up $3m in revenue is a post from: The Inquisitr

The usefulness of Twitter now stands to be further comprimised by new initiatives to entice power users to tweet for cash.

Anyone who uses Twitter can tell you what a royal pain it is to sift through spammy tweets in search of the interesting stuff. And now the company behind a controversial pay per post blogging program wants in on your Twitter feed, too.

While Izea believes sponsored Twitter postings will be “self-policed” and not run roughshod over the popular service, Twitter users know all too well how hard it is for people to resist the lure of incessant self-promotion and marketing. When directly linked with tangible financial gain, how long will it be before Twitter is useless due to the volume of spam?

This isn’t the first time Izea, formerly called Pay Per Post, has stirred up controversy in the blogosphere. From the AdWeek piece:

Izea is not without its critics, which assert that the company’s paid bloggers often do a poor job of disclosure. Julia Allison, an Internet celebrity of sorts, was heavily criticized for posting about Sea World without disclosing that her coverage was part of an Izea program. She subsequently updated her post to reflect that connection. The Federal Trade Commission recently set new guidelines for bloggers who endorse products for payment.

Even Izea’s CEO Ted Murphy admits the idea has the potential for abuse, saying:

“The question is going to be how do you meter it to make sure it doesn’t get crazy.”

If the recent Spymaster craze is any indication, it’s only a matter of time before Twitter is overrun with #spon hashtags

This tweet brought to you by… is a post from: The Inquisitr

As Twitter continues to boom, Twitter advertising is slowly starting to emerge as a hot button issue, at least when delivered by third parties.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb on April 10 covered advertising through one of a number of services that is offering Twitter advertising, Be A Magpie. Marshall originally attributed the ads to major companies, which Allen Stern at Centernetworks pointed out was incorrect: the ads highlighted for companies like Apple were affiliate ads (RWW has since amended the post.)

The notable thing is that affiliate marketers are using Twitter advertising to begin with. But does it work? I signed up for a Be A Magpie advertiser account to find out.

Before we start

In testing Be A Magpie, I’m not endorsing the service nor the form of advertising. I haven’t signed up to run ads on my Twitter stream, nor do I have any intention of doing so. I don’t think spamming your followers is a clever thing to do if you value your Twitter account, but having said that there’s a fine line between spam and self promotion; that’s not an argument I’m going to cover here.

Basics

Signup is straight forward. You add your email address and a password, and you have an account. To start a campaign, you’re asked to nominate a budget, provide a Tweet for the campaign, select keywords and set a maximum CPM. After you’ve set up a campaign, you fund your account via Paypal (in Euros only) and wait for approval.

The test

I submitted two campaigns for a total spend of 50 Euros (about US$74): a tweet for a bacon wallet on Amazon, and a tweet for Quantum of Solace on iTunes. I targeted the keywords fun and movies.

After the first day it appeared that the Quantum of Solace campaign wasn’t converting as well as the bacon wallet campaign (the figures following show I was wrong). I also knew that Amazon sets cookies that result in subsequent sales; that is, if someone visits the bacon wallet, then acquires another product (for memory over 7 days) I would receive a cut from those sales because they had the cookie, so I flipped most of the ads to Bacon Wallet.

The results

The CPM is based on the number of people who potentially read the Tweet. For example one tweet on an account with 1000 followers = seen by 1000 people.

Quantum of Solace had an exposure of 3652 followers for 119 clicks, or a CTR of 3.25%
Bacon Wallet had an exposure of 13022 followers for 344 clicks, or 2.64%

Number of direct sales on both: 0.
Number of indirect sales: difficult to tell. The Quantum of Solace links did nothing at all, where as my Amazon account shows just over $10 in affiliate payments this month, although at least half are not related to this campaign. Let’s say $5 in affiliate sales.

Result: doesn’t work.

Notes

Testing an affiliate program on Be A Magpie has its hazards: do you go low and hope that the chances of landing a sale are higher, or do you go for a high value product and hope that you might land a small number of sales, but get more for them.

I went low, so I can’t vouch for a high end ad. However if the aim is to convert tweets to sales, your chances have to be better with a lower price product (spontaneous purchase.)

There were other problems with the way the tweets went out:

1. Some users label the tweets as ads, some don’t.
From an advertisers perspective, the ones not labeled ads work better (and the stats showed higher CTR on the accounts that didn’t label the tweets). However, disclosure of advertising is a good thing in terms of transparency.
2. There were quality control issues with the accounts used
At least one account seemed to exist only to show ads, and the follower count was at best questionable. Another account wasn’t in English, so the Tweet likely hit people who don’t speak English, or at least as a primary language. This is a problem to considering that the target market for these links were Amercians; there’s no option so far to opt for Twitter accounts by country.

One positive: in one case, a Tweet was retweeted driving more clicks; that though means that the CTR could be lower because the system doesn’t track (from what I can gather) retweets by non advertisers (except where you use their tracking, I didn’t). It does mean you may get extra exposure though.

Conclusion

The mere presence of affiliate marketers on Be A Magpie suggests that there is money to be made using the system; well, either that or there’s a lot of people testing it. I can’t say that it doesn’t work for everyone, but it didn’t for me in this test.

The cost isn’t appealing: roughly 13.6 cents per click, and that’s not taking into account that the retweet of one ad may have delivered more clicks that would have been had from the paid tweets. Note I made both my ads conversational and appealing, a lot of the ads going out on the system look like ads and would likely have lower CTR.

If you simply wanted to drive traffic to a site, StumbleUpon offers 5 cents a page view, with the added benefit that if the page is voted positively, you often end up with more page views than you paid for (so it’s cheaper again.) StumbleUpon might not do affiliate links, but offers far better value if you’re seeking traffic to a page.

For Twitter users, the economics of using your account for advertising using Be A Magpie are a little strange: An account with 4,600 followers cost me €10.29 to advertise on, and yet Magpie offers a variety of compensation models, from pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, pay-per-click or pay-per-view for Twitter users. Only pay-per-view was available to me as an advertiser, so I wonder if they’re used to pay considerably less than 50% of the amount charged to the advertiser to the owner of the Twitter account (note: the 50% share is a guess, they simply don’t tell you what the cut is upfront.) Either way: you’ve got to question whether potentially losing followers by spamming them with advertising is really worth it.

In-Stream Twitter Advertising: Does It Work? is a post from: The Inquisitr

TwittAd lets you implement “product placement and web site promotion” on your profile page. Once you sign up for the service, you set the price you want and the duration of the ad. From the looks of it, you get paid a flat fee — not a traffic- or click-based rate. TwittAd says it pays you for “every hour you serve the ad.”

Tweet For Profit

So will we really see the profit-savvy Twitterer? As of now, TwittAd’s ads go only on your Twitter home page, meaning users who receive your feed through any other medium (including their own Twitter pages) won’t see the spots. The limited scope may make it tough to pull in a whole lot of dough at the start, but once the technology expands and ads start being attached to every Tweet (which is, in all likelihood, just a matter of time), the potential will definitely be there.

A Growing Commodity

On the whole, the past calls of “Twitter is dead” couldn’t be further from the truth at the moment. Check out Australia this month: Usage of the site down under has shot up an unbelievable 512 percent over the past year, according to numbers released by HitWise this morning.

It only makes sense, then, that more marketing and advertising are on the horizon, and not just with TwittAd, either. Researchers are already matching up particular businesses that might be a strong fit with the Twitter crowd, so don’t be surprised to see more and more targeted Tweets coming your way over the coming months.

Interactive Action

The other, less invasive trend is the use of Twitter to gauge reader perception and reaction to a brand or product — basically, observing and interacting rather than force feeding. Some forward-thinking companies have already explored this path and with some success, too — including one airline that seems to suck a bit less than the others. Then there’s Zappos, a company quickly becoming as known for its Twitter use as for its products.

Evolutionary Challenge

The question, then, is how long it’ll take for the rest of the mainstream herd to catch on and start turning to Twitter for marketing and money-making purposes. My prediction: Don’t hold your breath. The old media-new media evolutionary challenge — the same one we’re seeing traditional media outlets slowly struggling to overcome — is far from over. Whether it’s in the media world or the general corporate world, there are still too many people high-up who either don’t get it, or who just choose not to acknowledge it (“it” being both the importance and the process of intelligently investing time and capital in interactive resources).

Think how long blogging was around before it became a corporate and money-making concept. Odds are, more execs and entrepreneurs will eventually learn to embrace the profit potential of Twitter — but whether it’s placing ads, placing purpose-driven users, or just placing themselves in a position to watch and learn, the revolution won’t be an instant one. Time will change things, of course…but nothing’s happening overnight.

In the meantime, though, get ready to see dollar signs lighting up in the eyes of hardcore users. Someone’s going to be trying to turn a quick buck or two — and it can’t be long before Twitter itself introduces its own user-oriented monetization options to claim its piece of the pie.

This Twitter Feed Brought To You By… is a post from: The Inquisitr