Ive done my fair share of bagging ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets before, but it still amazes me how these networks are still running and no one has come up with a proper CPC model yet. Sure we have revtwt, but they are far from a professional network (Their banner wasnt transparent to the background for atleast 6 months, so it looked like it had been made in MSPaint). And really outside of that, we have smaller networks that dont really bring in the advertisers.
Why dont we take a step back and think about this from another point of view. Lets look at the “CPM” model vs the “CPC” model through the eyes of adsense. And yes i know that Pay Per Tweet <> CPM, but in a way, it sort of is. The advertisers are paying you based on how many followers or “Potential Views” they can get aka CPM . So back to the adsense analogy.
Anyone will tell you when they are a publisher of adsense, that the last thing they want is to be targeted for CPM banners. Unless you have a crap-tastic CTR, you would be making 10x as more on a CPC model. So if we put this into twitter-language. This basically translates into, if you have a bunch of really good followers who ACTUALLY read your tweets, then going for a Pay Per Tweet run is probably a bad idea. I think this was pointed out fairly obviously when Shoemoney blogged about his 0.06 CPC through Sponsored Tweets. As soon as i read it i thought, why the hell is this guy doing Paid Per Tweet, if he used say RevTwt he should be able to get 0.10+ cpc. Infact almost double the amount that he is currently being paid.
Who is winning in Shoemoney’s case? The advertiser ofcourse! Just like adsense. Im suprised Shoe has’nt done a writeup about this as he is well known for using CPM banners through adsense and i would have thought he would be right onto this.
So can any publishers win with a Pay Per Tweet model? Sure, the crap publishers and that is all. Just like i said at the beginning, the only adsense publishers that win with a CPM model instead of CPC are the ones with low click through rates. Just like on twitter, the ones who have use automation tools to gain followers (heh), and dont actually have real people reading their tweets, are the ones who will benefit from a Pay Per Tweet model.
In a way though, after thats all said and done. I can understand why Shoe and others have taken the road he has. There is just no viable CPC networks around. The only advertisers that seem to run ads are everyday marketers trying to push crap products. Whereas with Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly, they have real businesses vying for attention in the twitter world.
Just a little afterword here, I am not saying at all that Ad.ly or Sponsored Tweets are crap networks. I am merely saying that i think most publishers would do better with a CPC model rather then a CPM one. But just like website contextual advertising, that has no bearing on how good or how bad the networks running with CPM are.
