Here is a summary of a few monetization web services and how they work. They are available to any twitterer and may be of use to you, provided they fit within the context of your tweets.

Magpie – Be a magpie.com allows the user to have ads placed in their Twitter stream at a frequency that they choose. I’ve written earlier about how a social networks crowd resents the immediate monetization of a new service. Twitter is now mainstream enough where this kind of service could work. There are some downsides that others have written about:

• It’s a great way to alienate your followers
• The returns may not justify the above mentioned risk
• You’ll be needing a lot of followers to make this thing work for you.
• It threatens to degrade your brand, this is different than the first one in that the above relates to the personal relationship you develop with your friends on social media such as Twitter, you come off like the Amway guy at a party. This point refers to,for example, having started your account from day one with these Magpie ads. What does it say about your brand that you’d trade your friends confidence, (Following shows a degree of trust and confidence), that you would trade this valuable asset in for a nickel? It say that you yourself don’t have much faith on the long term prospects of your identity and what it is that your blog/service/company provides.
• It can be like a pothole, or whirlpool in the continuity of your stream.
• None of the big shots are using the service.

The only way that Magpie seems to work is when the ads are contextually part of that stream, in this case, the ads, because your in a social media, come off as viral evangelizing. I didn’t learn about Ben and Jerry’s until a friend told me about it. If your stream is consistently on a topic that the ads can flow in with, you may have a monetization opportunity without the alienation risk. But again, if your in an industry where you should be making thousands of dollars, what are you doing collecting loose change?
140chars.com has tried the service and
written about it , so I’ll focus on other aspects.

I took some screenshots of Magpie in action, and there are some things to be learned. A review of the service is nice, but there is insight into social media to be had here. As it continues to grow and mature, services will emerge, evolve and fail. It’s not as useful to judge them as it is to learn from them.

First, a sample of the ads I found Magpie to be running for the 24 hours of Febuary 8th, 2009:

• Betty page dresses
• Hand made ice cream
• An ER doctors photojournal
• organic soap
• A german website having something to do with sports, according to Alexa, not a big traffic site
• Cheap airfare site hosted on blogspot
• Steampunk gifts
• Handcrafted jewelry

Not a wide variety of ads, therefore hard for them to be relevant unless:
You do fashion and handmade stuff. Magpies ads seem to be in this genre. Probably because they are still trying to sign on bigger advertisers and can only get small businesses to advertise at very attractive rates. I can visualize the ad pitch, some poor hippy duck taped into a steel office chair fitted with blinders and being assulted with a strobelight while over a megaphone he hears, over and over again: ‘Information superhighway, billions of users, Twitter latest trend, ground floor, your industry heavy growth area in the next year. $5/month’. The proprietors have an inkling of the intertubes reach but not it’s social mechanics.

Note: I don’t mean to disparage the very worthy purveyors and practitioners of the hand made arts, not without insulting other minority groups as well, and, regrettably, there isn’t time for that today… so let’s move on.

In summary, pretty small time businesses. Magpie isn’t getting big accounts apparently. Or many accounts for that matter. What this means it that you’ll have have rough luck getting ads that fit into your stream context. That’s unfortunate because if Dell or some big consumer electronics outlets were using Magpie to serve ads, perhaps the big twitter tech people like Dvorak, Scoble etc would get on board. Even then, it’s doubtful. On Twitter, integrity is a huge asset, as increasingly seems to be the case with social media in general.

Now for the good news, below are some screenshots that show how Magpie can work for some people. You should note here that while there has been some high profile negative feedback on the service, the decision whether to use it is entirely yours. Social media’s flip side is that as admirers of the Twitterati we may pay too much stock into what direction they think things should go in. These > 10,000 twitterati are not the highschool quarterback or some homecoming queen, they are people you follow because they link to and talk about cool stuff. They shoud have their hands full keeping up to that task, not running the internet for us.

The first screen shot is what Magpie ads look like, #magpie and the ad. As mentioned before, lots of small businesses.

The second screenshot is of someone into jewelry and handmade crafts. The ad is for steampunk stuff. Do you know what steampunk is? Does she? Quickly, steampunk is a style that melds H.G. Wells era sci-fi with modern technology, it’s very cool, google it.

The ad does in fact fit into the context, the problem is that her readers, and possibly she herself may not know what steampunk is. But the ad does work in this context and is pretty unobtrusive. In this setting, it is forgivable to see in the stream. I at least could look past it. Guy Kawasaki pushing Dell computers on the other hand, not cool. So that’s one example of where Magpie has some potential value. That ad works as part of the service she provides, so it’s a good relationship and doesn’t get people thinking too much about how she’s trying to get pennies when she should be casting further out to sea.

The next screenshot is a solid match, if you don’t know what Magpie is, you certainly won’t be bothered by the ad. If you do know what it is, what’s the problem? The ad fits into context and we’ve all gotten used to Google ads anyway.

Since I’m now on the good-news-for-Magpie portion of this post, I won’t add a screenshot of an ad that totally clashes with the stream. Hint: Think theRealDvorak and hand made ice cream. No, he’s not using Magpie, but you get the picture, particularly if your aware of his cantankerous persona.

This particular service may have it’s biggest contribution in underlying the fact that social media marketing is all about the soft sell and the gentle approach. Magpies results range from used car salesman to the a friend at a party turning you on to Ben and Jerry’s. Results at present will be best for people in the handcrafted products/fashion zone. Beyond that, the hit that your name can take for selling things right off the bat before getting to know them may not be worth the risk.

Twittad – Put ads on your Twitter profile, simple enough. Direct ads for Twitter. A mini case study follows.

http://twitter.com/Joshlam with over 4000 followers, recently reported that he made $30 on twittad. The screen shot below shows a few key tweets that summarize his experience. Again, weigh this against the fact that he has 4000 followers:

• He made $30 in a month
• It took a long time to get paid
• He’s not running the ad again.

There have been 15 tweets on the subject of twitad in the last 24 hours. So there isn’t a great deal of interest in the service at the moment. Here are the percieved issues with it:

• The ads run in the background of your profile. If your monitoring the amount of traffic to your blog via Twitter, you’ll note that the traffic comes from search or the public timeline or third party apps and very much less so from your profile. This means that even though you may have a lot of followers, the value of the ad to that advertiser may be a fair amount less than is initially percieved. Not that this matters to you, though. If an advertiser wants to pay you more based on followers, so be it.
• The Amway effect. One of the tweets in Josh’s stream about twittad was a promise to put up a professional background after the ad is taken down. Not as bad as other monetization approaches, but still an element of ‘I’m sorry I sold out’ to it.
• This is interesting, Josh reports making $30 a month via Twittad. But go here What’s your Tweet Worth.com and type joshlam into the box. What’s the number you see? I saw $312/month. Have a look at the screenshot. You can also see that the site is affiliated with Twittad.com. So the ratings/benchmarks should match up. Either Josh is getting soaked or someone is exaggerating a little (Well, by a factor of ten). Perhaps it’s a syntax error. Yeah, that could be what it is. BTW, therealdvorak is worth nearly 2 grand. Somebody better tweet his fine grumpy self with the good news.

linkbee, adjix and linkbucks – These services let you monetize your outgoing links. When someone clicks on one of your links, the site the user is sent to is first proceeded by an ad. The ad either comes up before the web page or sits on top. Liknbucks is the biggest of the bunch and offers it’s highest payouts for interstatial ads at $1 for 1000 impressions. Obviously, high traffic is needed but for an article that gets alot or retweets, this could turn into some money. The Amway effect lurks, however in all of these schemes and the amount of screen real estate taken up even by the top banner ads may put readers off to your brand. Linkbee is similar to linkbucks but with a payout of $1 per 1000 ads, is a better margin. The flip is that they take up even more space on the end users screen and this actually starts to cross the line a bit. Adjix solves this problem by serving up much smaller ads on top but the payout is $.10 per ad impression. Worth noting, however is that GuyKawasaki has used the service and hasn’t taken a beating for it. In addition, adjix has an API that can help you serve the ads automatically, saving you time. Of the three, adjix is the least obtrusive but the payout may not be worth the hit you take on social points.Because adjix has the ‘blessing’ of Kawasaki, your own use of it may not be negatively construed.

tweetvalue.com – A curiosity, started by a purported math genius to calculate your Twitter worth. Spambots are worth a bundle. Check out This cat has 220 followers, 80,000 updates and is following nobody. Profile pic is that default ugly brown thing. Obviously, a bot. It’s value $8,953. The problem with this site is it doesn’t tell you where you can go cash in.

adcause.com – This last one basically runs like Magpie, and in the paraphrased words of Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, the medium of Twitter is not yet evolved enough for an advertising model to sensitize itself to the microblogging culture.

UPDATE:
Twittertise.com is not directly a monetization application but it allows you to track the links you tweet out and report on how many times those links are clicked. Think of it as analytics for Twitter. This is essential for anyone wanting to monetize their account. Knowing what circulates the most can help build traffic to your blog or application so it is a powerful tool.

One final note, The bigger and more you have to offer, particularly if the content is exclusive or you are first to tweet about it and your percieved value is high, the more leeway you are likely to have when running these schemes. People new to Twitter and other microblogs may only succeed in driving people away. Is this kind of monetization worth it? It can be, like Twitter things are still new and both are likely to evolve as the culture of the service continues to develop. Twitter itself has not yet chosen a monetization strategy, they are no doubt looking at the successes and failures of the models described here for ideas. One thing to keep in mind is that however Twitter decides to monetize, they may leave a space open for you to do the same. Their model may provide ways for tweeps, based on their authority, number of links and number of followers to make a bit of money as well. Will Twitter become a primary source of income? probably not. For the next few years it’s likely that profits will come from the relationships built upon the Twitter channel.

Related posts:

1. How To Use Twitter For Business Twitter is a fantastic communication medium that is rapidly developing...
2. Free RSS, Web and Twitter Icons Roundup Music RSS Icons Cute Critters Free Icon Pack 60...
3. Twitter Now Serving Free Ads For Third Party Apps TechCrunch:Twitter serving up free ads This is a nice way...
4. An 8 Step/30 Minute Twitter Regimen To Boost Your Identity Go to search.twitter.com and check your @ messages. Your...
5. 10 Strategies To Drive Quality Traffic with Twitter Get Followers: Yes, obvious enough but many people are...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.