Earlier this week Twittad launched a new advertising platform for Twitter. It’s a very ingenious idea – one that Twitter itself should have thought of and probably should adopt to start making money… Basically it allows Twitter users to sell ad space on their profile page. I did a quick interview with James Eliason, the founder of Twittad and also a local Des Moines entrepreneur..
How did you come up with the idea?
I came up with the idea in early July after reading the mashable article regarding extending the background on your twitter profile. I then heard about Scoble putting his background on Ebay..so I thought there needed to be a 3rd party site to handle the transactions between Twitter users and Advertisers.
How long did it take to build from conception to launch?
Conception was around July 5th and we just launched yesterday [August 27th]
What are your plans for the service?
The plans for the service include forming with other twitter “add-on” sites to help the promotion of Twitter users and advertisers. One site in particular, Twellow, I was just informed of today by Mike Templeton and they would be great to work with because they have categorized a twitter user. Advertisers could then target specific demographics for the purchase of their background images by using Twittad. It is partnerships like this that will help TwittAd become a leader in the monetization of Twitter. My ultimate goal is to work side by side with Twitter on creating a truly innovative product for the passionate Twitter community. Many people are going to be suspect of the Twittad concept, which is fine. However, it is my opinion that if we provide a backbone for users to help an advertiser promote their website or product, TwittAd will grow pretty quickly.
Even though you launched this week, has it been successful thus far? Have you had good coverage? Buzz?
We had pretty good response yesterday including a few comments from Wayne Sutton and also a nice article written by Mike Templeton at Microblink. [Link]
For more information on how Twittad works, read the how-to or follow Twittad on Twitter.
More on this interesting service to come…
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