Skip the rant ... take the poll...

I read the a San Francisco Chronicle article this morning on the pay-per-tweet advertising model which is starting to gain ground and has a lot of people, including me, feeling very uncomfortable (and not in a good way).

Advertisers like Sony, NBC Universal and Microsoft have lined up for campaigns that pay Twitter users a few dollars to $10,000 per tweet, depending on their number of followers or their sphere of influence. [...] In the past six months, companies like Ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets of Orlando and newcomer MyLikes of San Francisco have launched services to broker ad deals between Twitter users and sponsors. The tweets are supposed to be marked with notations such as "(ad)" or "#ad" to comply with new Federal Trade Commission guidelines governing advertisements or endorsements by bloggers, experts and celebrities.

Like a lot of people, I think this flies in the face of the "spirit of Twitter" and the spirit of opt-in marketing. It seems like bait and switch. We start following people because of the value of their tweeting, and now advertising begins to creep into the mix. Of course, I understand that folks gotta make money. But, as Mashable's Pete Cashmore asks, isn't this "the exact same outdated model of interruption-based advertising that we’ve been trying to block out with a TiVo or an internet ad blocker?"

Once our favorite tweeters are taking money from advertisers, can we trust any product recommendations they might tweet? Can they take advertising from Microsoft and still criticize Microsoft? Hmmm. Troubling.

I'm very curious as to what others think about this. Will you abandon those you follow when you start seeing their ads in your Twitter stream?

 Loading ...

Information & Opinions about Ads on Twitter

• Twitter Ads Are Evil: Here’s Why - Pete Cashmore
• Robert Scoble on in-tweet Twitter ads
• Mark Suster, Ad.ly investor, defends in-tweet/in-stream Twitter advertising