Pay per Tweet advertising coming to Twitter
Prepare for an onslaught of spam in your Twitter stream when “pay per Tweet” advertising launches.
Izea, formerly known as Pay Per Post, has announced that they will be launching a new product that pays users to send out messages, also known as “Tweets”, on the popular Twitter site. According to AdWeek, the new advertising platform will be called Sponsored Tweets, and should launch in about a month. Users will be able to set a rate for their messages where they either get paid by the click or by the message.
The company has made a name for itself, both good and bad, over the years for their Pay Per Post product, which pays bloggers to write about various sponsors. While the policy for these posts has always been that disclosure should be included that the post was paid for, the company has been lax in enforcing it and numerous posts do not contain the information.
There has already been a test campaign run with the Blockbuster video chain where Twitter users receive 68 cents per click on links included in their messages. The Tweets have carried a hashtag, a system for sorting Twitter messages, that said #spon to indicate it was a sponsored post, a method the company intends to carry forward with the new program.
Twitter users have been notoriously fickle about spam entering the site, but so long as the Tweets carry a hashtag, there will be solutions beyond simply unfollowing the user putting out the messages. Thanks to third-party services such as TweetDeck, a method for users to read the messages on their desktop, you can set up filters to hide any messages with specified hashtags that you want. It’s easy to imagine that the #spon posts will quickly get filtered out by the majority of users, which leads one to believe the system will either be a failure, or users will just conveniently forget to include the tag.
While Izea is not the first company to bring this concept to the popular site, it is the first to garner this much attention. It will be interesting to see just how the Twitter community reacts to it, but it is sure to be vocal about it no matter what they decide.
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June 6th, 2009
With Twitter most of the tweets seem to be spam – someone sending links, promoting some crap, or trying to get you to follow someone else. I wonder whether anyone is using it as a microblogging site anymore.
May 30th, 2011
Very helpful post man, thanks for the info.