TwittAd launches ad marketplace for Twitter pages that no one sees

September 2, 2008 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

Update: TwittAd chief executive James Eliason responds to my post in the comments with some additional thoughts on the company’s potential.

Here’s another startup trying to make money from micro-messaging service Twitter — TwittAd, a marketplace where Twitter users can sell advertising on their profile pages. At first, it sounds like an decent idea, but TwittAd needs to answer a big question: Who the heck visits profile pages anyway?

Okay, so I don’t have any metrics to back this up, but I’m betting that Twitter profiles (which list of all of a user’s messages) are some of the least-seen parts of the site. It’s just easier to follow people’s “tweets” through the main Twitter page, and through the “replies” pages, where you can read messages that are directed at you specifially. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I see users’ profile pages exactly once — when I subscribe to follow their tweets. I may have hundreds of followers, but I doubt my profile gets more than a dozen views in a week, and it’s hard to imagine that kind of traffic is worth much to an advertiser.

Also, it’s a little strange to link the price I charge for ads to my number of followers. After all, the whole point of following someone is that you never need to view their profile pages again. (Other tech bloggers are also skeptical.)

Still, it’s early days for the company. At least the ads are cheap and easy to create. The site also makes it easy to see who’s selling ads for how much. Maybe Twitter profiles get a lot more views than I think. (If so, I’d better spruce mine up.) And maybe this is just TwittAd’s first step, to be followed by bringing ads to other parts of the service. But if there’s a lucrative way to make money from Twitter advertising, I’m betting Twitter will get there first.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Point well taken, however there are a lot of site stats that we..meaning the general public, dont have access to. Your point is dead on though, just how many people view the profile pages? Well today Twittad has had 25 new followers...and I went to every single one of their profile pages and checked out everyones blog links. Am I along on this? Maybe.

    However, lets think of Twitter on a much larger scale. Imagine more spruced up profile pages, allowing users to actually link more than 2-3 web addresses, pictures and other applications. If Twitter produces that model, site views and the amount of time users spend on the Twitter website will go up. And so will advertising prices.

    We are working on increasing the scope of Twittad.com everyday, stay tuned because we have some pretty cool stuff going on.

    Regards,
    James Eliason
    Twittad President/CEO
  • Thanks for commenting, James. I'm definitely interested to see what else you guys come up with.
  • Anthony -
    Check out my site twittertise.com...just alpha-launched softly over weekend...let me know if you have questions
  • Anthony, perfect explanation of how people rarely visit profiles on Twitter. I also visit everyone once I get a follower notification - but that's about it. Besides, in addition to hardly getting any views, the ads also lack any clicking functionality - thus I don't see any value for an advertiser at all.
    But anyway it'll be interesting to see if our skepticism is valid when my one-month experiment with TwittAd is completed :) (Still waiting for my confirmation email, BTW.)
  • Svetlana,

    We are working on finding your email account in the database, I just sent you a message on Twitter if you could follow up on that we can get the confirmation email sent.

    Also, when someone clicks on a user to send a Direct Message through Twitter, they see the ad background of the person they are sending the message to. So the ad background is being shown on more than just the front profile page.

    Regards,
    James Eliason
    President CEO Twittad.com