November 24, 2008 | Monday

The flaw in the Magpie – Guest blog

By Simon Whittick

This post is a guest post from Rishi Lakhani:

Twitter and the traditional blog-o-sphere is buzzing about Be a Magpie – a new 3rd party operated twitter monetising scheme.

Robert Scoble has already started a huge discussion and there is a mixed reaction to the service so far, but most the SEO/Ms I know are opposed to the scheme and many have promised to quit following any magpie users.

Personally I think there are many options to monetising twitter, but I think this method is flawed. Why?

One simple flaw. CPM model.

Magpie shoots out one advert for every 5 tweets. In order to raise your revenue, all you need is to multiply your tweets or to increase your followers. And their site promotes these two facts for every low revenue account:

The problem? First off it encourages loss of value – if I start inflating my tweets, I am probably not going to have much to say (not that I do anyway, but this will be worse) and will be forced to just twit any old thing. That makes my tweet stream less valuable.

Secondly, I am encouraged to increase my follower count, which means I am probably going to start following anyone and everyone in hope of getting follow backs – the problem with this is I am devaluing my twitter activity just for the revenue, and though personally I wouldn’t, I am sure many would.

Thirdly, the model can be gamed. All I need to do is set off a twitter bot which follows thousands at a steady pace, or just follow all the bots that already exist, which would mean I get an inflated following. (most bots auto follow). Next step would be to hook up an autogenerated blog feed to the account, which would start auto tweeting every post that the feed generates. Voila – high follower account, high tweet ratio and high earnings. Its that simple.

Oh, by the way, if I spam you with magpie ads, I can earn: