Would You Sell Your Tweets?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 31st, 2008 1:58 PM

Earlier today, Darren Rowse posted what I would assume is a great April fools joke. No he’s not wrong with the date, he’s simply hours ahead of us over in Australia. While I seriously doubt that they were able to get a follower base of 250,000, this brings up an excellent point and is something that I would expect to see launch very soon.

Tweets can drive a significant number of visitors to your site. I know that I get a significant number of visitors from Twitter, especially when a user with a large number of followers tweets about a post of mine. Very soon we will see pay-per-tweet offerings even if Darren Rowse is the person to come up with the program. This is a duplication of PayPerPost but for the microblogging world. So the question then arises if such a system would be ethical or if this would be frowned upon by other Twitter users.

Personally, I don’t think it’s the best idea. Posting advertisements into the stream of tweets could significantly clutter your feed depending on what percentage of your friends decide to accept pay-per-tweets. Additionally, such a system would reduce the value of overall links on Twitter. While the system doesn’t yet exist and I’m calling b.s. on Darren Rowse’s post, I think somebody will try this out and the question is what will be the response when that happens?

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William O'Neill 1 year ago 1 point
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Makes me recall discussions in 1971 about the danger of commercializing the Internet, a system of communication developed to exchange ideas between scientifics. Tie an ad to your tweet and hang it out the window for your friends on any one of the social networks to gaze at, and see the response that you'll get. The late, and very regretted Vradik Lahanzi was right when he wrote, "Why do you think they call it advertising, stupid?" And Vradik was writing in 1939, well before Pearl Harbor, and well before Neil Armstrong (remember him?) decided to stop moonwalking and start twittering. I agree with Jeremy... the ad-like look gets you instantly unfollowed. Just how much are you offering for my tweets?

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Jeremy Herbel 1 year ago 1 point
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The first time that I see something appear in my stream that looks ad-like will get the person unfollowed pretty quickly.

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