Twitter may so far keeping an arm's length to advertising (Um. why?) but that’s not stopping others from trying to make a profit off of the popular microblogging service.
Last week brought the quiet arrival of Twittad, an ad service that allows Twitter users to place advertising on their homepage and charge according to their size of their list of followers.
Rather than tracking click through rates users will be paid hourly according to how long they maintain the ad on their site, and advertisers are refunded their fee if a twitterer takes the ad down before the allotted time has transpired.
Though the service avoids pesky spam twits, it is unclear how effective Twittads will be — most users never go to their friends’ homepages, preferring to view their updates through feeds.
Twittad currently has only 54 active users, but users may jump at the chance to passively profit off of their home pages. Two other services — Twitads and Twitad — are also poised to jump into the space (though Twitads' Twitter account is currently suspended due to "strange activity")
Built using the Twitter open API, it will be interesting to see if Twittad remains if and when Twitter decides to get into the advertising business itself. Though they may have awhile, considering that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently told us “we have not taken steps toward introducing paid advertising to Twitter."
