Magpie Tweaks its Feathers

by Jason
November 25, 2008

Magpie has jumped on the Twitter scene with a force and much of the more vocal initial reactions have been negative (check the 100+ comments on a Magpie post by @GeekMommy). However, with the amount of money they are paying out for occasional Tweets, I believe they are going to have a presence on Twitter for a little while, barring any declarations from Twitter to the contrary.

After receiving some initial feedback from their fast growing user base, (last reported to have over 500,00 combined followers) they have already made some significant changes to their service that should give them even more longevity.

I have used Magpie for 5 days now. I have had 3 advertisements so far worth a combined €18.33. To get any cash from Magpie you must reach a €50.00 minimum, which I could easily do earning over $5 a day, but for now I have turned off the ads.The original reason I signed up for Magpie was to review it as a new media technology. It is my industry and I need to know how these things work. I will not lie, when I saw I could earn over $2,000 in year with just 1 ad per tweet a day, I considered rolling with Magpie for the rest of the year. There are two issues I would have to see cleared up before I adopted Magpie as a regular service.

Overall, I believe Magpie is a value add to the Twitter community. They will be forced by their advertisers to produce a product that is not ignored by everyone, so I believe a balance will be reached or Twitter users will reject and bankrupt Magpie as a company. The latter seems less likely to me considering the changes they have made thus far. If nothing else, Magpie is the first of many and might encourage Twitter itself to start trying to make some money and ensure the service is around for the long haul.

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  • I'm one of the people writing a filter to hide the magpie ads, and it does require some way of identifying them in the text of the tweet.

    The reason you want to let people filter out the ads is that it gives them an alternative to simply unfollowing magpie users. Without a way to indentify and block the ads, magpie users will see more people simply unfollow them.

    With or without the hashtag, users will notice if people they're following start making exactly the same posts as others and without a RT or via referencing another user. If those Tweets are extremely out of context, which magpie ads so far have been, it will be easy to see who's using magpie.
  • Good review. I don't have a problem with Magpie as long as somebody isn't sending out adds every other message, or if half the people I follow all tweet the same add the same day. One or two a day is hardly noticeable.

    It seems they really pay a lot per tweet, but then I thought about how I click more links in Twitter than on pretty much any other service/website. They must be getting a lot of click-throughs per tweet.
  • @Danny - fair points. I have notices that the frequency of ads is light. i think its a lack of advertisers. but yes, not saying a tweet is an ad would be less transparent, but it is not false advertising. I was more referring to the fact that they allow the ads to be approved, meaning if I saw an ad that I did not approve of, I can not tweet it.

    @stuart - I think they had to make the #magpie label customizable so that filters will not automatically hide all the ads. that is the type of discussion I have seen around that specific issue.
  • Have they really said people were asking for the #magpie, which lets people know it's an ad, to be removable?

    <abbr>Stuart Robertson’s latest blog post..Shadow: Follow Updates Quietly on Twitter</abbr>
  • Taking away the disclaimer that it is a Twitter advert simply makes it even less appealing. You mention Twitter users will keep the trust of the followers, but trust works both ways. If an advert isn't being preceded by a disclaimer then it's false advertising - and that would break my trust with a follower and vice versa.

    And the CEO of Magpie himself has already said that it's only now that they're starting to ramp up the advert frequency - I think this will soon get a lot worse and show Magpie as nothing more than a PayPerPost for Twitter.

    Albeit a more annoying one.

    Count me out.

    <abbr>Danny Brown’s latest blog post..Drop The Retainer If You Want to Retain</abbr>
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