There’s a lot of buzz about a entry in the Twitter arena, Be a Magpie. The German company wants to offer you cash to piggyback on daily twittering.
In a nutshell they give you an estimate on how much you can make after they appraise your Twitter account. If you sign-up with them they would then send out a tweets from your account containing an advertising message. You are allowed to say how many they can send, from one ad to one tweet ratio to one ad to thousand tweets. The smaller the ratio the higher the payout. The tweets will have the hashcode #magpie to make it easy to spot the message as an ad. Also if your friends block the message your income would drop. This kind of a slippery slope to travel down. It’s like when one of your friends gets into the Prepaid Pasta* and you start avoiding their phone calls and try not to get cornered by them a party. You might want to make a few extra bucks at the expense of your friend’s eyeballs.
While this might be a great service I see it could easily abused and could become a target for fraud. A nefarious person could set-up a few hundred Twitter accounts, feed the accounts with canned tweets and walk away and wait for the deposits to come in. As an advertiser I would rather spend my ad budget on a performance based model.
While looking at advertising broadcasted via Twitter it brings the question of what is Twitter‘s business plan? The service cost nothing to users and it is ad free, but someone has got to be paying the bill. There have been reports that Twitter has experimented with advertising on it’s site in Japan. No reports on how well it was received or income the trial generated. With the volume of users and amount of tweets being volleyed about it seems that soon the day will come where Twitter will want to milk the cow. It may be ad sponsored and have users pay to use the service sans advertising. Then again it could become a pay for play model where everyone would pay to use the service.
From where I sit I can it the easiest way the company to reel in the cash is to use the cell phone service as the vein to draw from. Cell customers add small charges to their phones daily and the billing system in place is best matched for micropayments. It is smallest common denominator, both post paid and prepaid customers but money into their cell service that either taken out before use or after the use. They rollout branded service for difference cell phone providers who want to increase their customer base.
