The idea of ad-sponsored Tweets has been the subject of some controversy. Some say advertisements within a Twitter user’s stream could distort the user’s authority. The idea that a Twitter users (and advertisers) would be monetizing their followers is questionable and has raised some interesting discussions. Ad.ly, which launched last year, aims to link up advertisers with Twitter users and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the user’s tweet streams with full disclosure. Today, the advertising platform is officially launching its self-service platform for advertisers and revealing a few interesting stats about the ad service.
Ad.ly’s platform is designed to be self-service for both Twitter users and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The publisher then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. You can find examples of Ad.ly Tweets here, here and here. Each campaign requires the publisher to send out four Tweets over the course of a week and each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an ad campaign for a brand. Of course, publishers are paid and advertisers get their reach. Until now, however, the platform has not been fully open for all advertisers.
The self serve platform allows publishers to, create Tweet campaigns, access the system to pick publishers, see metrics to track the success of campaign. Advertisers can see click through rates of ads and conversion rates all through a realtime interface. Sean Rad, founder of Ad.ly, says the self service platform is designed to recruit small businesses who may have have smaller advertising budgets to participate in Twitter advertising. The platform also includes a pricing algorithm that will total how much the advertiser should pay the publisher per tweet based on performance of the publisher, clickthough rates, number of followers and other metrics.
Ad.ly also offers analytics that provides valuable data to advertisers including user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly recently partnered with PeopleBrowsr, a startup that data mines Twitter, to provide the data to users. Ad.ly will profile each publisher with user data, and will allow advertisers to target their campaigns according to this data.
Currently the Ad.ly network has 26,000 publishers (Twitterers), 21 of which have more than a million followers. Publishers range from celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Bethenny Frankel, and Soulja Boy, to publications like Newsweek, to influencers like Deepak Chopra and Mark Cuban. Advertisers have included Microsoft, NBC, Universal, Bookrenter, Hautelook, Clicker, and Chartbeat. More importantly, Ad.ly is reporting average campaign CTR ranges from 1%-3.5% (Rad says that Ad.ly has seen CTRs that are far greater than 3.5%). Rad says that this performance is key when comparing to clickthrough rates for conventional display advertising, which he says is be around .19%.
Unfortunately, Rad did not release any numbers to indicate how much money was flowing through the platform through advertisers and publishers, but judging by the quality of the advertisers, I’m assuming the campaigns were significant. Rad won’t reveal how many campaigns the startup has run or the number of Tweets Ad.ly has sent out, but he did say that in January, Ad.ly sent out “thousands” of ad sponsored Tweets from publishers.
But Ad.ly is just one of several ways that Twitter can be used for advertising. Robert Scoble presented us with a compelling model for advertising on Twitter, called a Super Tweet.Of course the elephant in the room is when and how Twitter will be rolling out its own form of advertising. Twitter COO Dick Costolo mentioned last fall that Twitter will be incorporating advertising of its own soon, but we don’t know what this will look like yet.
Now just curious why do they NEED to say from ad.ly what if the user just tweets an ad and doesnt have to state it (AD) that defeats ppl from clicking it, needs to look viral otherwise ppl wont click something that says AD lol.
They have to use a custom source since they send through your account using the Twitter API.
The real joke is this will become trivial to block in 3rd-party clients. It might start simply as a hard-coded option to block all from “Ad.ly Network”. Later the clients can easily add a custom user-defined block list for tweet sources.
If it ever becomes widespread, they’d add a self-updating list of ad sources to block.. especially likely if the clients are trying to display ads of their own.
> 21 of which have more than a million followers.
How many actually use it though? I took a look at a few streams of those apparently using it and they rarely (if ever) use the site, it seems they’ve signed up just to check it out, not to use it. Any figures on how many actually use it (ie: post adverts)?
Did some marketing on ad.ly and sponsoredtweets and realized that the ROI cpc is much better when selecting users in the range of 2000-10000 followers. just a quick case study. average of 0.20/click
Leena,
We have had self service in SponsoredTweets.com since we launched it. I would be happy to share some stats with you and provide some information about our upcoming v2 release.
Leena – Just a heads up from Assetize.com. We’ve partnered with a prominent sports agency to build a Twitter monetization network exclusively for pro teams and athletes (some already signed on).
Launching in 2 weeks. Happy to connect, if you’re interested.
Congratulations to Sean and the team for the public launch of the Self Service platform. The operational benefits will be enormous. Looking forward to our next big announcement – equally, if not more, exciting.
Grammar police. Second paragraph.
“which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then”
too?
Monetizing your followers turns your audience into a crop to be farmed. Is that what twitter is about?
Good times …
TweetROI, our twitter advertising network has been online 8 months (since July 6th, 2009).
We’ve sent 6000 tweets for 194 marketers via 1400 twitterers. These 1400 twitterers have an average of 3115 followers for a total follower-reach of 4.5 million.
The model is cost-per-tweet. Tweets can cost the marketer from $0.25 to $5.00; depends on how you bid, and you can bid to pay more for the more
influential twitterers, less for the less influential- that ensures better response. The idea is to get your message out via twitterers that
get retweeted (viral) and responded to (conversations). Cost per click varies comes out to $0.75 – $1.25 average.
We’ve worked off and on with a social media shop in Chicago, and they tested us against three of the other biggest paid tweet networks (including Magpie and Sponsored Tweets), and by running each of us at different times as well as together, TweetROI delivered the greatest on-site response for the dollar (despite wide variations in the networks’ reported clicks).
Congrats to Sean and team on public self-service launch. Look forward to next announcement that is currently being worked on as well.
Glad to see Los Angeles on the map!!
PS: Could more competitors possibly hijack the comments section on this post???
Just chiming in: at Magpie (the original Twitter Advertising network) we’ve been doing exactly this since late 2008 :)
Over on RWW, Sarah Perez has a great recent article with a lot of in-depth information on the entire Twitter Advertising industry:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/can_you_get_paid_to_tweet_part_1.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/can_you_get_paid_to_tweet_part_2.php
No offense, Leena, but I am a little disappointed to see you cover only the one network which hasn’t really innovated here, but rather copied a lot of ideas from its competitors…
Congrats sean – very cool….keep pushing!
@Willie I’m going to concur with Jan; it’s odd to see an article like this that doesn’t mention the significant companies in the field. I’m certain we competitors wouldn’t have “hijacked” the comments if we hadn’t been ignored in the piece ;-)
No, we still would have. Let’s face it. We’re in advertising.
well very interesting.so I need a large follower to be able to get money from ad.ly by using their advertise link right? :-).better start pulling many of my follower now then.
@Jacobian I don’t think it has to do with large follower numbers – they contacted me and I don’t even have 1k
Congrats Sean. Lookin forward to your progress going forward.
@Brian/@Jan Respectfully disagree. There’s always articles and coverage without competitors mentioned, and I’m sure your co’s have been beneficiaries from it in the past too. I know we have.
We’re in a similar position (competitor in the space, with same feature live), but kudos to Sean and team for getting the PR.
If Ad.ly is the way to crowdsource your brand’s celebrity spokesperson, it will be interesting to see how many big brands really want to do that. I’m guessing not many.
Strong advice….BE CAREFUL OF THIS SERVICE THEY JUST LAUNCHED! I paid for numerous tweets to be sent through this new self-service platform, I was charged, the platform CLAIMED that the tweets had been sent, but, as I had been following all of my “advertisers”, I noticed that actually not one of my tweets was sent. They admitted to me on February 22nd that there was “a bug in their system….we will get back to you as soon as we know what the issue is”. Now, over one week later, I have not received a refund and my repeated emails to them have not been answered. Either this service is just not ready to go live, or, they are complete frauds.
Just a follow up note. They have now gotten back to me and reimbursed my account in full. Wanted to make sure to tell the whole story.
ad.ly? twitter is dying as a whole. the general public of america lost interest long before.
if no one uses twitter who would use adly?