What It Feels Like To Sell Out And Stick Ads In Your Twitter Feed
Last week when I checked my email on my commute home, I was greeted with an unexpected message from someone named Andrea at a site called MyLikes.com.
"Hi Jay," it read, "I work with an impressive list of celebrities and well-known bloggers, tweeters, and famous faces of YouTube. We’ve found you to be amongst the most influential personalities on Twitter, and we want to invite you to use our platform, and monetize your influence."
I was skeptical because I’m obviously not one of the most influential personalities on Twitter. I’m probably not even top 15. It sounded like spam, but I kept reading.
“After you sign up at http://mylikes.com/, with your followership, and engagement level, our system estimates you could make upwards of $1500/week, even at your current rate of tweeting, by signing onto our system and choosing some ‘likes’ to tweet, and with no extra effort.”
Any one of the 3,517 followers I have on Twitter might think I’m dumb, but I’m not that dumb. I knew there was no way I could make $1,500 per week through my tweets.
And yet, I kept mulling it over in my mind.
"$1,500!," I thought, "That's a second job, just for tweeting! What if they're right? What if I really can make that much money. What if, what if, what if? I know I won't make $1,500, but let's say I make just $100 a week. I could do that for a few weeks and have money to buy some new golf clubs."
Once that idea crept into my mind, it was pretty much over. Who could say no to free money for tweeting? Even if it took all summer of using MyLikes.com to get enough money to buy some new clubs, I was willing to do it. Then I could quit using MyLikes.
I briefly wondered if I would annoy my followers. But I really didn’t care. Anyone that’s following me has been getting amazing wit at a discount price. If they couldn’t handle a little ad in the stream, then screw ’em.
(But, my god would I be heartbroken if my follower count dropped.)
At any rate, the next day I decided to sign up at MyLikes.com.
It was pretty simple. I plugged in my Twitter handle and password.
But as soon as I signed up, MyLikes unexpectedly told everyone! Very awkward … and I was immediately teased by a few followers.
Here are the “likes” MyLikes offered.
If I “like” something then it’s tweeted out to my followers with “-ad” tagged at the end of the tweet. The Twitter ads were pretty slim pickings.
For $0.28 I could tell my followers about Britney Spears manager looking for a new talent. Not something my followers care about. For $0.04, I could direct them to a Discovery Health story about side effects from prescription drugs. That was closer to something I’d actually tweet.
MyLikes CEO Bindu Reddy later told me that the prices vary based on how many followers a person has, as well as how well their ads perform. If I had 100,000 or more followers I could send out ads worth $1.00 per click. As more people click on my ads, the I could see high prices per click.
