Magpie has been on the Twitter scene for several weeks now, but I’m just finally getting around to discussing them here. Simply stated, Magpie is a network that matches advertisers’ messages with willing Twitter users.

How It Works

1. Advertisers create campaigns providing a message and some keywords.
2. Matching Twitter users are selected, costs are calculated based on # of followers and hotness of the topic.
3. Ads will be blended into the message stream at a rate determined by the user.

Community Feedback

The Twitter community has been talking about Magpie with fervent opinions on both sides (take the Twittrratr stats lightly, as this is a good example of where their algorithm hasn’t quite yet been perfected). The blogs have also been abuzz, with great opinions and evaluations from thought-leaders in the industry:

• Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) concludes that Magpie’s advertising system is self-diminishing,
• Cory O’Brien (@CoryOBrien) lays out why Magpie has failed as an ad network
• Kerry-Ann Gilowey (@kerry_anne) says, “Magpie is a noisy bird“
• Rick Turoczy (@turoczy) maintains he’ll keep posting annoying content on his own, for free
• Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) started a huge discussion about Magpie on FriendFeed

Interestingly enough, the last comment on Scoble’s FriendFeed discussion is from Magpie’s CEO, Jan Schulz-Hofen (yeah).

Thanks, Robert for starting the discussion. These are very intersting views, positive and negative. Thank you all for the feedback. We’ve silently introduced a number of changes to Magpie yesterday to give tweeps more control over their magpie-tweets. You can now hand-select ads, put up your own disclaimer (other than #magpie) and control the tweet/ad-ratio better. I’m looking forward to reading your blog post and to getting more feedback in the comments. Thanks again. (I’m the CEO of Magpie & Friends Ltd.)

It’s difficult for me to pass a thumbs-down judgement on Magpie, as I feel they have come up with a unique way to advertise on Twitter. Many have been put off by the amount of Magpie ads flowing into their timeline as a result of the people that they are following, but I see that as the ad-publishing user’s problem, and not a problem for Magpie.
Read the full story

TwittAd (@twittad) is a new service created by James Eliason (@jameseliason) that allows advertisers to pay Twitter users to promote a product, website or virtually anything else through an ad uploaded to their profile background.

There has been much speculation about when this type of monetization would happen. The ability has always been present for users to upload their own backgrounds, but the discussion was fueled even more by the Mashable post describing how to set up a custom Twitter background.

Read the full story