Earn Money like the Celebs in Twitter's Popularity Contest
21:12, Wednesday, 02 December 2009
The world of advertising has seen a massive shift in direction over the past few years, and not only in the UK. Across the World, TV channels have struggled to keep their hold on the big money as their target market move to the web for everything from shopping and news, to movies and streaming television programming. Contextual advertising was perhaps the first advent in the online World to herald accessibility both on the part of publishers and advertisers, to a massive and highly-targeted market. All of a sudden, Webmasters and Bloggers could get financially rewarded for providing great content.
So when Twitter took the internet by storm after its 2006 launch, heads were scratched over ways to monetize what was to become an almost-overnight phenomenon. Affiliate marketers and the like were inevitably quick to spam their followers with product recommendations and reviews, in the hope of boosting their Clickbank balances, and then Ad.ly hit the scene earlier this year, with a rather novel spin on how to cash in on Twitter's success.
Ashton Kutcher had long-since been hailed as the first Twitterer to reach a million followers, in April 2009, and many Celebs (both real-world and online “names”) were racking up a healthy following. So with each of these celebs attracting their own special kind of demographic, and with many followers eager to know what their idols had to say on everything from Demi Moore's bedroom attire to what's happening on the set of the latest Harry Potter movie, Ad.ly saw an opportunity to “employ” Twitter's most popular commentators to sell their Client's brand.
Here's how it works: You're the CEO of a drinks company, and you want to have the hip young kids buying your product. Choose an Ad.ly publisher that fits the bill, in terms of follower numbers and market appeal, and pay them to tell their followers about your product. It's concept that has had a few months to bed in as I write this, and judging by the increase in Celebrity costs, it seems to have been a great success.
Not only that, if you consider yourself a Twitterer of note, you can join the Ad.ly network too, and share in the revenue. You choose your own price, and the advertisers select you. Now there's some incentive to get more followers. Time will tell whether the Advertisers are getting their rewards, as Twitter gets older, and the number of lapsed followers will inevitably increase. For the time-being, though, there are opportunities to be had in the monetized World of Twitter.
Tags: twitter, social media, advertisin