What's your Tweet Worth?

This is a perfect "lazy sunday" post. This post will provide some juice on Twitter and the state of things. For almost a year now, Twitter has been the poster child for everyone who has been chasing Bright & Shiny Objects in the Web.

Now a new service called Twittad is launched which wants to monetize the Twitter background real estate. The company is allowing Twitter users to make their page backgrounds available to the highest bidder. Each listing includes the number of followers, the duration, and the price. Advertisers can then purchase the spots, with Twitter ad collecting a 5% commission on the transaction. So far there aren’t enough transactions completed to estimate the average value of a Twitter follower over a given time period, but this example of a recently sold ad spot for an account with 250 followers went for $5 for one month.

Now the company is sponsoring WhatsYourTweetWorth, a vanity site where you enter your Twitter name, and it tells you how much your Tweets are worth based on how many followers you have.

But there are inherent problems with this new business model:

1. Page backgrounds are not clickable (See here) and there is no easy way for a third-party service to track any meaningful metrics other than impressions.

2. With so much activity taking place on your friend timeline in the Web Interface or in a third-party apps, profile pages are not necessarily valuable estate.

3. Lastly, one most imminent problem is that I rarely go to my friend's Twitter profile since their tweets are visible on my twitter profile or third-party apps. So its like pushing ads to myself only at the end of it all.

Few possible solutions:

1. Try working out these ads in a blended format with the tweet stream (though it may prove out to be annoying).

2. Forget about trying to sell ads on Twitter pages, and put ads on WhatsYourTweetWorth instead.

3. These ads can at the best work out as pure brand advertisements for clients who just want to push in their messages in the twitter profiles.

Despite the inherent problems in Twittad’s model, there are a number of other companies attempting to monetize web page backgrounds, including AdCamo, who is providing a platform to both publishers and ad networks.

Courtesy: TechCrunch & Mashable

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