A friend of mine tweeted about signing up for Ad.ly. I went over to see what it was. Basically, for a twitterer, you sign up, select what types of ads you approve and once a day it will tweet an ad in your stream and pay you for that tweet. (The example they gave on the about page was a tweet about an episode of a show.) My first thought was..umm….yeah I don’t think so. But as I paused to think about it I wondered a bit.
Many people have talked about how they blog less because they tweet. Tweets aren’t just “I’m having a cup of PG tips right now” (which I am), but are often advice, philosophical thoughts, commentary on something someone found interesting. In short it is “microblogging” for many. I don’t have an issue with people having ads on their blog, so why would I have an issue with people having an ad a day on their twitter stream?
I think perhaps there may be two parts. One is, an ad on blog is separated from the content, and I know it is an ad. In a twitter stream, given our conventions, it seems like the person is speaking the ad themselves. The second is a blog seems like it has a potential to be more polished more a “work”, while tweets of 140 seem more casual, and so I run against the “wait you can’t make money for that” bias that is common in our populist movements of the web.
Ultimately, something like ad.ly makes me think. I haven’t signed up myself, but I think my resistance may be based on old patterns. When is ok to make money for something? Is an ad in a tweetstream changing the nature of the medium? What do you think?
{ 1 comment }
microblogging is really useful when you want to broadcast short updates. i am still leaning towards traditional blogging.”.*
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