31 Oct Add another unethical company to the list: Magpie
In the ongoing saga of “How Will Twitter Make Money?”, Read Write Web has a story that a company called Magpie offering to help you monetize your personal Twitter account. Last year we saw the ludicrous auctioning of a Twitter account on Ebay which in and of itself was unscrupulous, to say the least. That auction was pulled after several folks blocked Andrew Baron got an ear full from folks like me.
Now this new player, Magpie, has sprouted up offering to ghost tweet ads in place of your actual tweets. Also fitting is that at the time of this writing this post their site is currently down for maintenance. How Fail Whalesque.
The business model of posting ads into your account is straight up shilling, according to the WOMMA definition. Sound familiar? That’s because this flawed ad revenue model has already had its dick knocked in the dirt. If you recall, a few years ago a company called PayPerPost (now Izea) tried to capitalize on shilling and non-disclosure on blogs. Google appropriately took the appropriate action of removing their page rank, deeming these blogs irrelevant in Google’s search. Google’s reason? You f with our business, we can f with yours.
Given the history and Google punishment don’t be surprised if the folks at Twitter shut Magpie out before it even gets off the ground.
Update: Their site is back up. Mixed reviews over on Twitter.
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