AntGalvin’s Blog

I first heard about Twittad on Techcrunch today. What is Twittad? Its brief tag line says “Let your ad meet tweets”. The tagline may be brief but it doesn’t mean anything to me.

What Twittad does at the moment is allow you, a twitter user, to sign up and sell the background of your homepage. In my case that would be the page located at http://twitter.com/antgalvin. When you sign up, you set a period (a Tenure) and the price you wish to sell your background for.

If an advertiser decides that based upon your number of followers, you look like good bang for the buck, they can sign your background up. Here is an example. @miketempleton signed up $5 for 1 month.

Example of a Twittad

So the background of this user’s twitter page is suddenly converted into real advertising space. Bear in mind that the backgrounds on Twitter homepages are images – There is no click through to another web page. Advertisers must bear in mind that they are buying a fixed static space for a fixed time, click through isn’t relevant.

Its early days for twittad. According to their blog they have been in operation just a week. However going by the information on their front page, I could only find the ad above which was for a venture the twitterer is involved in personally, and for filmfitti.com which is another product of Gray Zone technologies – The company behind Twittad. Like I said, early days – It is hard to say whether Advertisers will be genuinely interested in this take on advertising.

One major problem that I can see for advertisers is in estimating the value of placing an ad on any one twitter profile. One might rush to the view that the more followers a Tweeter has, then the more likely that the user’s profile will be viewed.

In fact, (and as pointed out by techcrunch), users of twitter rarely have any reason to visit a fellow twitter user’s profile. For me, usually the only time I will check out another profile, and so see the background image is when that user starts to follow me. I will receive an email from Twitter informing me, with a link to the profile.

So Advertisers should in fact look for “growth in number of followers” as a more likely indicator of the potential success of a Twittad. The Value an advertiser places on this may only be judged over time and I think it would be in Twittad’s favour were they to start publishing more developed metrics then are currently available on their homepage.

To finish, I don’t think this is the future for advertising on Twitter. The lack of accountability on the Background images is a retrograde step in online advertising. However, Twittad are to be commended on making a good start.

• The Twittad URL.
• The gathering of Twitter users’ credentials.
• The press garnered in this last week.

All of these will help twittad’s first mover advantage. But do they have the imagination to make full use of this advantage?

(On a very picky note, Something made me doubt the professionalism of the Twittad website. The Favicon (i.e the tiny logo that appears in the address bar beside a website’s URL) for Twittad appears to be that of the Plesk server management software. Looks like someone forgot to change that on Go live).

Twittad Favicon