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Monetising Twitter with Magpie Ads – Week 2 round-up

December 12, 2008 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

When I wrote about my first week of using Magpie to monetise my Twitter account, I wondered if there was the inventory to even get close to the ratios of 5 posts to one advert.

The second week appears to be backing up this theory – since then I’ve had just a couple of advertising messages, raising my earnings up to the 17 Euro mark, despite leaving the ratio at 5:1. At this rate it will be quite a while before I reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros.

But as I said before, this is a good thing in some ways, as one or two adverts a day seems to be an amount that doesn’t offend – and perhaps the number of advertisers will increase after Twitter co-founder Biz Stone picked the service over monetisation alternative Twittad in an LA Times article.

“I think any kinds of projects that focus more on the Twitter updates are more compelling,” Stone said.

For the record, Twittad is claiming 1600 sign-ups, 170 advertisers, and I’ve just finished my first month of allowing them to serve adverts on my profile page. (Feel free to book me for another month right now!)

Interestingly Ev Williams has recently said the economic climate means Twitter will seek to monetise in Quarter 1 2009.

From Cnet: “The revenue plans aren’t just ads or sponsorships. “We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”

Still, in the meantime if you want to try Magpie, why not use a link that also helps to fund 140char? Strangely the Twittad affiliate scheme seems to have a form error at the moment.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: biz stone, evan willians, inventory, magpie, monetising, monetizing, money, results, revenue, round up, twittad, twitter, week 2

Interesting questions for marketing

August 11, 2008 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

My Bauer Media colleague Dave Cushman has raised some interesting questions in an excellent blog post: 17 lessons for the new marketing.

Hopefully he’ll forgive me for pointing out that as an ex sub-editor and production editor, blogging has had an effect on his spelling! Unless assetts is a clever pun!

He raises important questions about the purpose and value of content in the modern world. One which is navigated via Google, RSS, social networks, and chat. One in which it’s possible to find almost any information/content for free if you have the time. And Bill Drummond’s 17 project is definitely a good trigger for thinking about new ways to consider content.

I do disagree that having an almost infinite amount of music means it loses value – in terms of interest, and whether participating always gives rise to a richer experience than being part of an audience – even of one. As a musician, I’ve had some appalling times trying to play with groups of people – and I’ve had some superb times listening to recordings alone or with friends. And sites like Last.fm allow me to listen to far more music than I’d have encountered via broadcast media.

And in the modern world, long dead musicians are being remixed, reproduced, and mashed into new symphonies by people who weren’t even alive for the original recordings. It’s not about retreading the path of the minstrel back to the dark ages by dismissing recordings, but embracing the new ways of continues creation for a piece of content by new artists and new technologies.

Perhaps this is one of the most important lessons – and one which necessitates the move from broadcast. That of constant change. What may work for me at one moment can change within seconds, and the only person who will know that change has happened will be me. And that constant change is only made possible by broadcast technology (ever wondered by uploads are so much slower than downloads?) being re-purposed by the end user in the same way as radio gave rise to pirate stations, and video and digital TV gave rise to lo-fi film-making.

What we’re both striving for is a new outlook and way of doing things to ensure future relevance and success. David sums it up with his opening question for editorial/media types:

What do you do if you don’t have any content?

And points out how that leads to the likes of Google, Youtube, Wikipedia and Twitter. Interestingly only one of them is an undisputed financial success, but in terms of content, they have an almost infinite amount and yet create nothing except the context in which to access it all.

When asked about resourcing levels, I once heard someone say ‘Content will take care of itself’. I don’t believe that’s true. What I believe is that ‘Content will be created by itself – and it’s our opportunity to take care of it’. And that means the creation experience, the publishing experience, the marketing experience and the live experience. All things that traditional media companies have experience of doing, and could now begin to perform as a service, rather than an end in itself. After all, as David would say, we’re in an era of unfinished symphonies.

(And I’ve since learned that it applies to Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy:

“The percussion loop is the “belly break” sampled from a Bob James‘ cover of Paul Simon‘s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” which was also used by Run DMC on ‘Peter Piper’. The voice at the beginning of the song is a sample of John McLaughlin“. – from Wikipedia.

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Filed Under: marketing Tagged With: Advertising, assets, bill drummond, content, david cushman, faster future, marketing, media, monetising, monetizing, music

How TV companies 2.0 can make money

August 2, 2008 By Dan Thornton 7 Comments

This all came from two articles by two of my Twitter connections, starting with Charles Arthur writing on the Guardian website about the need for television companies to come to terms with filesharing. In it, he suggested TV media firms could make low quality versions of their shows available as they are broadcast as a way to encourage people to download a high resolution version.

Peeebeee (Peter Bowyer) examined the link Charles had made between music and TV companies and the effect downloads are having, and suggested that the way the music industry can monetise is not necessarily applicable (low quality freebie for driving high quality purchases), mainly because music will be replayed over and over.. .

It’s taken me a while to respond because I wanted to add something to the conversation, and try to hypothesize how I’d monetise online television. (If you think it’s taking me a while, try asking Google about Youtube!) And although I don’t work in television (Aside from the sadly discontinued MCN Daily…*shudders*), my day job consists of working out how it can be possible to fund a large magazine and website company from engaging community.

My theory is that the answer is more obvious than you’d think, because it’s something that film companies have already done, when they sold us on DVDs. Aside from allowing us to posture about the quality on our widescreen television, and pause without burning through a tape, DVDs convinced many people to part with money for the value of the extras which were included – even for films they might already own on video.

So expand the same theory to online. I may already be able to watch a film or TV programme via filesharing or a legitimate streaming channel, but what could be added to a package which would make it worth parting with a small amount of money? Could you include DVD-style extras and outtakes? Could you also include background information? How about putting complete series together online, or the works of a particular writer, director or actor. Which could then be sold on DVD, and as a complete download?

And what about also including all the related links, reading material, and even User Created Content?

Now I could find a lot of this via a fair bit of web searching, but that takes time and effort – and increasingly the exponential growth of material online means people are looking for ways to filter content, and aggregate it efficiently, and are willing to pay for it. As Steve Jobs once pointed out, finding a copy of a song via filesharing can translate into working for less than minimum wage – fine for time-rich teenagers, but not for anyone feeling time-starved.

And providing best-of reading material for certain content would be a incredibly useful for information rich shows. Ironically, while my partner has been watching Hollywood films on DVD over the last two weekends, I’ve had the time to watch the inspirational ‘Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams’ by Randy Pausch, and also ‘An anthropological introduction to Youtube‘ by Michael Wesch.

Both times the Youtube video was an hour or more long, which is fine for me, but would be better in DVD format for the non ‘digital natives’ I’d love to shave them with. They both refer to people, places, and reference works which might be useful to have in digital and print form. Both lecturers have previous work which would be useful to have included (not just videos, but written articles and academic works etc). And neither of those works is likely to even appear on a mainstream (Say Freeview for the sake of argument) TV channel in the UK, where we have to make do with a short internet show once a week on the BBC, and the occasional programme discussing the risks of online networks.

Essentially, any content which doesn’t require high budgets and production values is already legally uploaded and available on Youtube. Anything that does incur a huge cost is losing part of it’s audience to filesharing, or is being served online in ways that can be frustrating (You can’t watch a show on BBC iPlayer after seven days, and that’s about the best of the bunch). None of it is giving me a reason to pay a couple of pounds to get extra value, as opposed to the imported DVD boxsets I own, signed by the director, and containing material I wouldn’t have otherwise seen at the time without a lot of hunting around.

It’s not about criminalizing fans who fileshare and promote your product. It’s about making use of the advantages of being large scale content creators and giving those fans reasons why it makes sense for them to spend an amount to invest. iTunes isn’t the best music store in the history of the world, but if you’ve got an iPod it’s easy to go there and spend a few pounds/dollars, rather than sorting out filesharing software and downloads. Despite access to films online, and the Xbox film service permanently attached to my HDTV, I still subscribe to Lovefilm, because it’s easier to get films delivered than order them online legally, due to the shocking state of broadband speeds outside major cities in the UK. And that’s what has cut my DVD purchasing, way more than availability online.

Give me a reason to pay for TV and film which justifies itself in terms of making my life easier, and giving me more than enough value to justify it to myself, and it won’t just be me who will be tempted…

NB: And actually, artists are already pioneering this in the music industry. Just look at the $1619420 Trent Reznor made from the recent Ghosts album.

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