Earlier this week a new twitter advertising platform launched called ad.ly.
ad.ly has some pretty large celebrities on board… actually some of THE biggest celebs on twitter. But there is still room for the little-middle (70k follower) guys like me. I signed up and instantly was offered a campaign from NBC about one of their upcoming shows and got paid $290 for tweeting it out. There was also a True Blood season finale/behind the scenes tweet that I was to late to sign up to be a part of.
But no matter how small your follower count is it seemed like everyone was offered to participate in this NBC deal. David Dellanave (my partner in ShoeMoney Capital, INC). Has less than 1/10th of the followers I do and still got the invite to get paid to tweet about the NBC program.
In fact everyone I talked to said they were offered the NBC tweet and True Blood tweets.
Ad.ly is not your typical twitter advertising platform. They do multiple tweets and scheduled tweets so the advertiser gets the best possible performance.
Checkout the Video from their Launch. It includes some pretty big celebrity endorsements like Dr Drew, Chamillionaire, Tony Hawk, and many others:
I look for big things from ad.ly. I have written about the reasons other twitter advertising networks “don’t get it” before but ad.ly is open to listening and adapting to what people want and for that I think they will be very successful.
Full Disclosure: I hope to play a bigger role in ad.ly in the future if things work out. I really like their CEO and investors and where they are headed.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 69 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s hard to believe people are still talking about making money on twitter. I don’t think it’s possible to do it. If you’re a regular IM such as myself earning around 8 – 9K per month it’s a waste of time to mess with twitter. Stick to PPC advertising to bring home the bacon.
Nice information, but until this day i am not used twitter for ads or something like that.
Nice blog. Informative & impressive content.
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Well it looks like a promising company, and I do too wish them all the best. Although I have never really tried advertising with twitter, it looks as if it might be a very effective way.
How long will it take until this service is bought by twitter?
If you wonder what are the other ways to monetize your Twitter account, you must read http://www.money-era.com/category/monetizing-twitter/
I have 2,000+ followers on Twitter I think it is hard for the small people to get tweets from these companies. I think it is great for people with high numbers like you have that are making a lot of money. I think it will be hard for us small people.
Greg Ellison
What a great service! I think this is an excellent example of Twitter advertising and look forward to seeing how it develops in the future (I’ll confess I’d love to see such an idea come to fruition for authors like Diane Gabaldon, Donna Gillepsie and Cathy Cash Spellman….)
I also have a post in que for monday about Ad.ly. I signed up to their network as both a twitter user and advertiser, but have yet to hear from anyone on setting up my advertiser account.
Yeah, good idea but I dont think it will go anywhere. To many I tweet you, you tweet me accounts that are pretty much worthless, which makes it hard to advertise sucessfully on twitter. Even though 290/70,000 = 0.004. If 1 in a hundred actually gets a chance to read it (is there any way to check network overall ctr?) than its 40c CPC I guess…
Actually, making 10 I tweet you, you tweet me accounts may pay off for the effort… 
Nice post.
I don’t really like twitter i don’t know why
great info about ad.ly! thanks
I tried to get on board with sponsoredtweets today after reading a post on John Chow but my account isn’t old enough? I am going to take a look at ad.ly now. Thanks
Still not a big fan of twitter advertising personally..
May i personally ask why?
i love picking peoples brains about why they like/dislike stuff!
$290 for 1 tweet??? Not a bad deal at all. Of course I assume it depends on your follower number… Maybe Ashton should quit acting with his 3.5 mil followers…
i think it is quite easy to make money on twitter. anyway good information
I developed a firefox plugin that blocks a page if it contains the word twitter. 95% of websites are now blocked.
j/ks
I have signed up and I look forward to seeing if I am given any offers ($176 an ad is what they suggested so I went with it). They have a great domain and a fantastic UI.
Is SponsoredTweets falling through the cracks or do you still get offers from them as well?
You can probably survive just with your twitter ad income jeremy. lol
I know LOL! I don’t think that you are too far behind him Liane.
I would like to think that it’s a great idea but something is wrong about all this. In e-mail marketing, people must opt in to receive e-mail from sponsored. Don’t see why it should be so different on twitter.
Overall I still think it’s a great tool for advertiser because you can control the news of the day …. That’s a powerful asset…. However I can see FTC jump on that sooner or later….
If you follow somebody it is like opt-in.
“it is like” but it is not you can opt in to a newsletter but that doesn’t mean you want to receive every brand ads….. anyway just my point view…
That’s an interesting take on doing advertising on Twitter. Loving the video.
“Thank you, Mom…” lol
Looks good, I will sign up once my following is big enough to make some money. Love the video. RETWEET! lol
Congrats ad.ly. The constant follow spamming to get followers had died down a bit. Now that you are offering incentives for people to spam just to get a bunch for followers so they can spam them and get paid for it. Expect twitter to go back to the bad old days.
George,
follow spam will never stop – some of those dating sites are making big $$ off them. Sure its died down in the tech/marketing community’s, but it will take a while for the real spammers to stop. even email gets spam and peaple where saying “its died down a bit” ages ago.
Also,
Biz Stone (twitter co-founder) has stated previously, that they dont mind ads, they even went on to say that they prefer peaple tweeting ads than using their background for advertising.
Also,
Their is full disclosure in the ads, meaning they basicaly shout at you saying “im an ad, this is so i can eat dinner tonight”. If you dont like it… unfollow them!
Also,
if anyone else is reading this, please use service’s like Ad.ly responsibly. i like 1 ad for every 20 tweets at minimum.
Also,
Shoe – $290 for 2 tweets? damn, i would hate to see what those celebrity users are getting!
Actually ad.ly does really good analytics and ratings so advertisers can see what users will give them good ROI.
Advertisers are only going to pay for what gives them a positive ROI (well unless they are retarded)
I checked out the website. The advertising option seems to be good and so is the payout. But my only concern is about the Twitter TOS. One of my account was blocked just because it was posting advertisements from Magpie. Twitter says it is automated tweeting, hence the blockage. Either I was very unlucky or, this is how Twitter works. But if this is how Twitter works, then wouldn’t this too be a violation of their TOS.
Ad.ly uses twitter OAUTH. i think that kind sums it up in 4 words
the thing with OAUTH, is that twitter can clearly see where the tweets are coming from and can click one button to stop it all, with magpie they cant, so they resort to blocking users.
thanks for the info
I think the site http://retweet.it works just as well at promoting yourself or your blog or website and passing tweets around through retweeting.
I disagree-
I have checked out retweet.it and you have to earn points by retweeting others junk which means when its your turn to be retweeted your just lost in their stream of retweets.
Its a interesting concept for free traffic but not for quality traffic and certainly not traffic I would ever want to pay for.
Sounds like a traffic exchange program. There is a ton of this follow back, comment back, retweet back, and link exchange type stuff that will always be going around.
While these might generate followers, RTs, and traffic, they aren’t realistically sustainable and don’t benefit the user long term.
They offer better prices than sponsored tweets.
Although not much like twitter, it is still an alternative platforms that already exist. Good information.
Ok! I’m the only one that noticed pee-wee herman at the end of the video sending a tweet for the first time
I will give it a try when I get the time to.
I can’t access my twitter account in china. Don’t know when Chinese govt will unban Twitter in mainland china.
Is it not the same thing that facebook is facing?
I think from a strategic perspective, ad-ly has a reallly higher chance of making it big for themselves & the others, who believe in their potential. I do. However, a little more competition & variety in advertisers would do everyone something profitable. What say?
I look forward to seeing how this will be doing a couple of years from now. I think we will see a massive userbase created and a quick flip
I have been reading all about sponsored tweets recently and I think I like the idea, but I have not heard of the good returns from $290 for two tweets that seems a lot of money. I think I will definitely have a look at this site, I think you are right they do seem to have completely understood the concept and no doubt will be very popular.
Another good advertising platform on Twitter has launched. This is a good news especially to those Twitter fanatics.
I signed up as well, 9,000 followers but I gues you have to be some kind of celeb to get a campaign.
Peter Ralph
Now there will be a rush on Twitter to get as many followers as possible. For some this might be a good way to make money but I think ad.ly will mostly be abused and after all I don’t know if I would like to follow people who I know tweet one ad every other day.
This sounds like a legitimate way to monetize Twitter. I am looking forward to signing up and browsing the roster of twitter users and possibly buying a tweet or two.
I’m glad to know the new twitter advertising platform. Thanks for the info.
m8gc3t I want to say – thank you for this!
don’t really like the idea of monetizing twitter though at time it looks tempting, but will try not to monetize it
No matter what you use Twitter for, you are most likely following more than a handful of celebrities. There is something oddly satisfying to reading about their misfortune, and thinking to yourself about what you would do with just half their money. Now on the horizon is a new service to help both celebrities from real life, and the growing crop of Twitter power users “online celebrities,” monetize their influence and reach online.
I think this is just another platform to use to monetize your twitter account.
The one I knew of which I just sign up with is Sponsored Tweets. I dont know which one is better but I’ve not seen an offer since.
I’m glad to know the new twitter advertising platform. Thanks for the info.
I’m giving this a try. No idea what will happen, but I can always cancel if I don’t like it.
Twitter is good site to make advertising and make social contact It useful to improve your business thanks
what about geographic location..
i`m from Malaysia, does there is any advertisers?
Almost all advertisers are US based I have seen so far.
so sad.. do I didn`t have any chance to get campaign even though I have some followers from USA?
by the way, thanks for great sharing information..
it’s a very good tool to use.
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I’ve been signed up for a few Days, and haven’t gotten any offers, It was automattically set to $37 Dollars, but after a few days i hadn’t got offered, So i changed it down to $5 just to see if anyone even bothered looking, No one has,. I have over 3500 Followers, and counting, Kinda confused.
mm.. so sad.. got no offer.. since October 2009
Ive now been on this for a couple of weeks. Does this only work in the States or what. I live in New Zealand.
When I first signed up with them I didn’t get any offers, I almost forgot about them completely and then all of a sudden I started getting a bunch of tweets from them, about one a week. I don’t have a ton of followers almost 4000 but I managed to get about 3 – 4 dollars per tweet.
I’ve been with ad.ly for about 4 weeks I think and haven’t heard anything, I’ve referred a few people though so maybe that will get me some ads…
i’m not sure I agree with everything that you’re saying, but I like the way you express yourself in your beliefs. I’m following your RSS.
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