As social media ser­vices grow, they become more and more inter­est­ing for adver­tis­ers. Mag­pie, a brand-new “twit­ter adver­tis­ing net­work” (and in no way affil­i­ated with the RSS-parser library bear­ing the same name) is offer­ing tweep­ers money to embed spam ads in their time­line. This sure was unavoid­able, but at first glance, the European-based net­work is doing a pretty nice job.

Since I’m an online entre­pre­neur, I’m nat­u­rally very inter­ested in new ways of mon­e­tiz­ing my social media activ­i­ties — but I would never rec­om­mend any ser­vice which I’m not a fan of, which ulti­mately leads to the one require­ment that any ad net­work *must* take seri­ous: I want con­trol over the mes­sages I’m send­ing out — whether to my fol­low­ers on twit­ter or as ban­ners on my blog. And Mag­pie takes this fac­tor into con­sid­er­a­tion: every paid tweet can be pre-approved before it is sent out.

Psy­cho­log­i­cally, Mag­pie is doing quite a great job: new twit­ter­ers are encour­aged to enter their user­name, based on which Mag­pie dis­plays the amount which “could be earned” — I guess that this is a pretty rough and very opti­mistic approx­i­ma­tion, since the sys­tems tells me that I could make nearly 2.000 Euros a month. The tuto­r­ial video explains how the exchange of atten­tions actu­ally works:

And how does it *really* work?

The sign-up process is really sim­ple — adver­tis­ers need to apply for a ded­i­cated log-in, twit­ter­ers have to deal with the ol’ trust prob­lem: Mag­pie requires them to enter their pass­words; I hope that an authentication-token is on twitter’s top pri­or­ity list.

1. You define a tweet fre­quency at which you will accept magpie-tweets for your Twit­ter account. Given your cur­rent tweet rate per­mits it, our ser­vice will try to find a match­ing magpie-tweet and twit­ter it. For max­i­mum con­trol, you’ll be asked to pre-approve magpie-tweets.
2. To help your fol­low­ers rec­og­nize magpie-tweets, you can define a cus­tom dis­claimer which we’ll hap­pily append or prepend to all your magpie-tweets.
3. Depend­ing on the com­pen­sa­tion model of each suc­cess­fully deliv­ered magpie-tweet you will be rewarded in cash.

That’s pretty much all there is — and since the publisher’s terms and con­di­tions do not require you sell your soul to any kind of devil, I became curi­ous and signed up, as it is pos­si­ble to pause one’s account at any time. I’m really curi­ous if Mag­pie will be able to turn tweets into bling-bling or if users will rejects ads at all. This is what the dash­board looks like:

You have to be aware though that Mag­pie is dis­cussed quite con­tro­ver­sially: While Mar­shall Kirk­patrick senses dark-side qual­i­ties and Dave Fleet feels abused, Stu­dio Rizzn explains the truth about “evil Apple”.

What about the earnings?

Mag­pie is using Pay­Pal, you have to earn at least 50 bucks to qual­ify for your first vir­tual pay­check. Besides from inter­cul­tural gaps (Euro­pean users tend to be a lot pick­ier about com­mer­cial tweets and US cit­i­zens), I guess that Magpie’s suc­cess will largely depend on the adver­tiser pool: if they offer enough inter­est­ing con­tents and man­age to suc­cess­fully pitch their sys­tem to the right adver­tis­ers, this could be huge. I’ll try Mag­pie for the next two weeks and keep you updated, or you might want to start your own exper­i­ment: Sign up for Magpie