How not to make money from Twitter

Be A Magpie promises advertising bucks from Twitter. But even with outside help Twitter struggles to find a viable business model.

A week ago today the penny dropped. I had been reading about Be A Magpie (also know as just "Magpie"), a service that enables you to sign up to "tweet" advertisements during your normal use of Twitter and earn money from each one placed. I signed up, if only really to see how it worked and whether there really was potential for those who love Twitter to benefit from it financially.

But as I did this I was reading loads about Obama's use of Web 2.0 on his way to a seat at the White House. And I wondered: what if I search Google News for Obama news stories (you can guess the quantity this time last week), take an RSS feed from that, push it through Twitterfeed -- which I have long used with great success to broadcast blog updates and the like -- and then add Magpie to place an ad between news items from which I then receive revenue? With Twitterfeed delivering five news items each 30 minutes (with more than enough Obamafest material to work with) and Magpie placing a money making ad between each news story, that's ten ads an hour with what sort of earning potential if I let it just chug away in the background? I sniffed an easy money making opportunity: both from the plan and writing and marketing a "get rich quick" book about it aferwards!

First off, I should point out that Magpie got on to me pretty quickly. Okay, asking, over Twitter, whether I had discovered a scam meant I actually tripped myself up at the first hurdle (the Magpie guys use Twitter search it would seem), but it did lead to some enlightening dialogue with the guys at Magpie HQ in Berlin. Latching on to my plan, they first claimed I would be committing fraud; this was rubbish, but we agreed to settle on breach of Terms of Service: Magpie states that automated tweets are a no-no if you sign up to their service. So then I wondered what if you occasionally take a news feed item but the rest are hand crafted? Where is the limit?

Magpie claims to have an algorithm that calculates whether you are tweeting automatically and to stop you earning from them if you are. I think it may be simpler than that, but there is no doubt they look to ensure "reasonable use" of RSS feeds, bots and the like before they decide whether you should be making money from their ad service. The "limit" was unspecific, in spite of asking; a "reasonable" amount of automated tweets was all I could get them to confim they considered acceptable.

So do you want to know how much twitter.com/obamaupdates earned from 391 posts over the week? Er... nothing. Even my long running Twitter account of twitter.com/wecando.biz has only earned me 0.84 Euros over the two weeks I have been running it (around 70 tweets, most of which are Biz Needs from our website posted through an RSS feed).

So what's happening? Is Magpie intelligent enough to stop you earning from automated tweets, as they claim? Are there too few advertisers to serve enough ads to tweets that the money making potential is actually there, even if you play by the rules? Or did they just rumble me and sabotage my experiment? Who knows. What we can be fairly sure of is that the guys at Magpie haven't presented a viable business model to Twitter or its many fans just yet.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz