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Our Blogs Core Dump Making a dollar from a Twitter rent-a-crowd
Our Blogs Core Dump Making a dollar from a Twitter rent-a-crowd | Making a dollar from a Twitter rent-a-crowd |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Wednesday, 01 July 2009 | |
  
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The company uses the term "artificial popularity services" to describe its activities. But then it also boasts of ignoring a cease and desist order from Digg. (If you think you detect a negative vibe here, you're right.) "We have gotten some bad feedback about some of our services," said uSocial CEO Leon Hill, who went on to claim "we do get a lot more positive than negative response". I can see the point of buying votes on recommendation sites such as Digg. A page that manages to rise above the background noise level can attract substantial traffic via Digg, though that pales by comparison with the 'Slashdot effect' which is famous for bringing web sites to their knees. But artificially boosting your Twitter followers seems a strange thing to do, unless numbers are seen as an end in themselves. Presumably the idea is to convert followers into customers, or at least into a audience for ad-supported content. Maybe I'm missing something - or just being too cynical - but what's the point in paying money to bring in thousands of followers that aren't actually interested in what you've got to say? And who is to say you'll retain those followers? I suppose the economics are somewhat similar to spam - if you get your message in front of enough people, then some of them will be interested. The difference is that spam is extremely cheap to send, and buying followers is rather more expensive. Still, uSocial says it can get you 100,000 followers for $A3479, or roughly 3.5 cents per follower. If one percent of them are interested in your messages, then you need to make $A3.48 net profit from each of them to pass the break even point. Good luck trying to do that with Google AdSense! |
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