About a month ago I signed up to be a twit­terer for Mag­pie, an ad net­work for Twit­ter. Basi­cally, they match key­words you tweet about with ads much like Google’s AdWords. They orig­i­nally pro­jected that I could make about 40€ per month if I agreed to let them insert ads into my tweet feed. Not bad for doing noth­ing but con­tin­u­ing to use a free ser­vice I already love! After a month of using the ser­vice, here’s my ini­tial feed­back and list of #mag­pie tweets. The site itself is very easy to use, much like Twit­ter. It took only a few min­utes to set up my account. All I had to pro­vide was my Twit­ter login, email, and address where they could mail a check to me. There were only a few cus­tomiza­tion options such as tweet/ad ratio (I chose 1 ad per 10 tweets) and cus­tomized dis­claimer (I chose to put #mag­pie before all ad tweets). I also had the option to pre-approve ad tweets.

I could also refer new adver­tis­ers for addi­tional coin (30% com­mis­sion for the first year adver­tiser runs ads) using my per­son­al­ized refer­ral link. You might have noticed the badge I placed on my home­page. These became the most pop­u­lar tweets I ran even though I chose to run them every other day.

#mag­pie Run your own ads in other people’s Twit­ter time­lines– http://be-a-magpie.com/d6qubl

You can see all the #mag­pie ads and pro­mo­tions I ran in the last month via this Search Twit­ter query. I only ran 3 real ads the entire month! They do a nice job of dis­play­ing when, what, and how much on your account page:

You can see that in one month I earned about a dol­lar (USD) for 3 tweets. I wasn’t able to attract any adver­tis­ers even though I gave about 18 tweets to do so. Was it worth it? Yea, I guess. A buck’s a buck.

I think Mag­pie has a lot of work to do. They never kept up with my mod­er­ate ratio of 10 tweets / 1 ad. The ads were pretty on-point, but generic nonethe­less. As you can see from my Tweet­Stats, I’ve been tweet­ing a lot more this semes­ter and on a vari­ety of top­ics so I would have thought Mag­pie would have had an eas­ier time ful­fill­ing it’s nearly 40€ per month quote. 

The debate rages on whether or not ads have a place on Twit­ter and what their role is, but that wasn’t the point of this post. Just my expe­ri­ence using the tool. I liked the ini­tial idea of earn­ing money by doing noth­ing, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to keep me tweet­ing for them. I have actu­ally seen an increase in fol­low­ers as opposed to dri­ving them away with my ads, but I think that has to do more with me becom­ing more involved on Twitter.

I hope Mag­pie gets there act together and starts insert­ing more ads so I can earn more money, but that seems to be how every­one feels on their feed­back forum. In the mean time, I’m off to con­tinue play­ing Sim City on my iPhone!