by: Matt Rhodes
There’s a lot of discussion about Twitter at the moment, mainly because the service seems to be struggling to keep up with the growth in user numbers, but I’ve been following a different development.
Ian Schafer is selling advertising on his Twitter feed for a month. He’s listed the ad for sale on eBay, and you can see the listing here. When the item closed today, it went for $1,082.01.
So why is Ian doing this. Well he works in advertising, infact he’s CEO of Deep Focus and, as he says:
Someone’s got to figure out some kind of business model with Twitter. And I’d rather be part of the solution.
I like what Ian’s doing, we need people who innovate and try new things. It’s the only way that new models of advertising and marketing will be developed, whether on Twitter or in other social media and networks. It will be interesting to see who won the bid and how successful the sponsorship proves – but for less just over $1,000 it’s almost certainly going to be good value given the interest there is bound to be online about this first sponsorship.
What we need to do now is let the market explore and decide on what the going rate for such advertising might be. Perhaps if we let brands decide how much they want to pay on an individual’s Twitter feed, that might be a good way of measuring how influential that feed is thought to be.
Original Post: blog.freshnetworks.com/index.php/2008/06/07/whats-a-twitter-ad-worth-1082/
