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Be a Magpie: A Spam Advertiser for Twitter
Hey guys!! I’m sure many of you guys are aware of, and use the service called Twitter. As per Wikipedia’s definition, Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
One of the most useful features that I can figure out about this service, is that blog owners can communicate with their readers through text messaging. This is great for those that update frequently, and want input from their readers on the go.
I first heard about this service from JohnChow.com, as he is an avid user of the tweet, and regularly posts his users responses in his blog posts. Personally, I am not a fan of this service simply because I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of constant text messages for blog updates, but I do understand the value of the service and it is indeed an interesting concept.
John recently wrote about “Become a Magpie.” This magpie service is, in a nutshell, a new ad network that is tailored to the twitter tweet. Very simply put, they pay you to send sponsored ads to your twitter followers.
Yes, thats right, you give the magpie the right to spam the pants off of your loyal readers!! I know, I know, who in their right mind would want to do this? According to John Chow, if he were to use this type of advertising, it would add almost $1500 dollars to his ad revenue monthly. No small peanuts to most of us, but for someone that earns over $30k a month from his blog, thats only a 5% increase.
And for what?? To tick off your loyal readers?? I’m sure there will be some people that won’t mind, or that like John’s blog enough to put up with ad spam sent directly to their cell phones, but for the most part, people were not happy when they were polled a few days ago. With the Akismet spam blocker for WP, and junk mail filters for your email, you’re safe from spam for the most part, but starting soon, there will be no defenses against twitter spam!!
You’d think that with all the anti-spam campaigns out there, the Magpie idea would be a giant flop - only time will tell how many people will be able to put up with that kind of forced advertisement, as that’s what it really is, forced ads. I have no problem with conventional methods, but Magpie is really just another way of saying SPAM.
So bloggers, stay away from the Magpie if you value your Twitter subscribers, otherwise you run a great risk of shooting the cute little blue bird down with your subscriber base going belly up. Really, they should call the service “Be a Vulture,” but that isn’t nearly as appealing.
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Social networking is going commercial. Twitter could ban users using Magpie.
I like that according to Twitter’s TOS commercial usage is OK. No one wants spam, but Twitter is a business and will have to see money come in some manner some day. Someone is paying for bandwidth and servers. Even Wikipedia is begging for money on every page now. So, maybe Magpie is Twitter but using a second party to float and see how things go.
You get what you pay for.
True indeed!! Does wiki use adsense?? You’d think they would at least throw that up there for money!!!
hey hi.. sorry was not well for some days.. well i noticed the magpie long back, and even wrote abt it, as soon as the service was out (some 3 days later to that)..
Make money with twitter, using Magpie
i think this post contains some initial opinion of twitter community on magpie…
Caroline Middlebrook had a recent post where she declared that losing readers because of her monetizing efforts is not losing dollars. The readers who unsubscribe never was or will be money in her bank. It are the ones who stick around afterwards that are important.
Maybe it is the magical formula for us up and coming MMO’ers to figure out- make money pitching while building readers. John Chow probably pitches 3-5 make money services (money in his pocket) a day between blogs, newsletter, Tweets, etc., plus all the ads on his site. That is why he makes $30K a month AND continues to grow his readership (44K subscribers).
Mann.. that is way too large money and readership….!!
Welcome back Nikhil!! Long time no see!!
I’ve been using Twitter for a while, but it is difficult for me, because to get the benefits you really need to interact a lot.
At first I spend lots of time there, and then I found that time was better spent doing other things for my MMO biz, You can really get caught up there. Now I just check in every once in a while and I use a Twitter plug-in to update my blog posts on auto.