Twitter is still trying to come up with a revenue model but Ian Schafer thinks he has already come up with a decent one. Ian has placed a sponsorship opportunity on his Twitter account. The winning sponsor will get their company on his Twitter page background, his Twitter avatar and a link on each one of his tweets.
With only 450 followers, the bidding on the Twitter sponsorship eBay auction page is already up to $545 with 3 days remaining. I’m not quite sure if this is a gimmick to try to raise his level of followers but this is a substantial amount of money for a 1-month sponsorship. As far as I can tell this is not against the Twitter Terms of Service so Ian may just end up with an extra few hundred dollars to spend.
I’m sure my followers would get angry at me if I kept putting a sponsored link on every tweet. I already catch slack for promoting my blog via Twitter so promoting someone else in addition would probably be crossing the line. Would you sell sponsorship on your Twitter account? How much would you charge?
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It'll be interesting to see if that number grows or shrinks once he starts doing sponsored tweets, and what form those tweets will take.
Ian does call it an "experiment" in the auction page, and I think it's worth trying out. Sponsorship may be a viable way to monetize microblogging via twitter, just like it's a viable model for monetizing full-scale blogs.
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There will be no impact on the text of my tweets (a la @scobleizer). That's annoying. Instead, what's up for grabs is the skin on my profile, and the replacement of my avatar/icon with the high bidder's logo.
As for the cost, I figured it had to start somewhere, and given the high value of some of my followers (take a look at the list, you'll recognize many of them: http://twitter.com/ischafer/followers), I figured it carried a B2B premium, yet still wouldn't impact the tone or content of my tweets. Heck, I thought 400 bucks was a bargain.
And any money generated is being donated to charity (The David Wright Foundation).
Again, this is being done to make a point and start a conversation.
I'll be blogging the process (and the coverage of it) after the auction is over.
Thanks for joining the conversation (as @jaffefuice would say)!
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