MillionDollarFollow: A Different Kind of Twitter Ad Network
When we first looked at MillionDollarFollow, a new Twitter advertising network with some interesting twists, we couldn't help but compare it to the Million Dollar Homepage. MillionDollarFollow (MDF) is quite different, however. Instead of advertising a product or tweeting affiliate links, MDF tries to get its users more followers. Rather than thinking about MDF as an advertising network, it's actually probably best to think about it as a Twitter lottery with some added benefits, even if you don't win. An ad on MDF costs $1, and users who buy an ad are regularly entered into a lottery drawing where they can win new followers. The final winner will receive 1 million followers.
MillionDollarFollow was developed by Jonathan Nelson, who is also behind Twittermass, the auto-follow product we wrote about a few weeks ago.
MDF uses the Twitter OAuth protocol, so your login and password are safe, but, when you buy an ad, you also authorize MDF to send a tweet about your ad to your Twitter stream.
It should be noted that when you sign up for MDF, you do authorize the service to automatically subscribe you to up to 150 Twitter users (there are 150 drawings in total). You can check the FAQ for more details about how the system works. Advertisers can also put a MDF widget on their homepages, which is obviously designed to give MDF more exposure, but, as Jonathan tells us, it can also increase a user's chance of winning.
10 cents from every one dollar ad will be donated to Malaria No More.
How Will the Twittersphere React?
Of course, just having followers for the sake of it is not exactly the best way to find interesting people to interact with on Twitter (and might not be what Twitter is all about to begin with), so it will be interesting to watch how the Twittersphere reacts to this experiment. Feel free to let us know what your thoughts about MDF are in the comments here.
If anything, we hope that those 1 million followers will go to somebody who has something interesting to say...You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis, Jolie O'Dell, and Phil Glockner.
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"If anything, we hope that those 1 million followers will go to somebody who has something interesting to say..."
No. If anything, let's hope that 1 million people won't be dumb enough to sign up for this useless money grab.
First off thank you Frederic and RWW for writing up a fair and balanced article on MillionDollarFollow.com
@ryan - First off this application is 100% legit and is not money grabbing at all. MalariaNoMore.org and myself have partnered on this campaign and 10% of all proceeds will be directly donated to help put a stop to Malaria. MalariaNoMore.org will be posting an official blog post on their website shortly. Second, this $1 advertisement that a person or business will purchase for their Twitter profile will probably be the cheapest and most worthwhile advertisement they have ever made online. It wasn't shown or mentioned in this article, but I just released an advertising widget that advertisers can use on their website or blog. This widget is much like Google Adsense in that it aggregates and cycles through each advertiser from MillionDollarFollow. You can see an example of these ads on the TwitterMass.com homepage, Frederic Lardinois blog at LastPodcast.net or http://is.gd/xCkF. Why would advertisers want to put an ad widget on their website or blog? When an advertiser creates a new ad widget and puts in on their site they earn points towards winning on MillionDollarFollow.com. This is the actual advertising network component. So over the duration of this entire campaign literally tens of thousands of eyeballs will be viewing these advertisers Twitter profiles throughout the Million Dollar Follow Ad Network.
If you have a concern, praise or see something that can be improved. I'm all ears.
Email me at jonathannelson[at]me.com or message me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jonathannelson and I promise I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
that's an intersting concept. The only advertising I've done through twitter is with a site called http://www.tweetTrafficads.com. It worked pretty good and I got some good traffic from it.
I might try the million dollar follow too.
thanks for the article.
Eric
I hate auto-followers. I hate people who follow for the heck of it. I think this is destroying twitter. You should only follow people you are genuinely interested in.
You rightly commented that Nelson has regurgitated the "million pixel homepage" into the "million dollar follow" and it has about the same value in my mind. I award this idea not a zero but a "negative valuation" because it does harm.
By no means do I have the most followers on Twitter, in fact, my numbers are paltry. Having said that I've built my business based on strong relationships with many of my existing followers and that's the real value. Further, you'll never see me tweet the claim that I can generate 20K followers in 2 days if only you watch my say nothing video and then afterwards agree to buy my clipart designed download from my run on for ever prospect page complete with manufactured testimonials.
Just like spam is something we detest, Nelson's concept I think has the same potential to generate a negative reaction.
Credible community members immerse themselves in building relationships, learning, observing human behavior and most importantly deliver value in near real-time. Nelson's concept undermines the true value that Twitter has to offer and the fact that he's attempted to add credibility by donating part of the proceeds is transparent and offensive window dressing. The commoditization of followers is the fastest way to cheapen the community. I for one think Nelson has missed the mark, big time.
Quite honestly I feel that some people are contradicting exactly what social media marketing was meant to be. CREATIVE! I've been in the internet marketing industry for over 10 years and all of that experience and brainpower goes into each of my products. I'm working on an improved relevancy factor right now for Million Dollar Follow as well as TwitterMass. However, I still have not heard a peep from anyone about the actual distributed ad network that Million Dollar Follow provides.
So please ask yourself this simple question. How powerful would it be if your business had over 100k followers on Twitter? Pretty powerful. Enough to change your business and possibly your life. Just ask @guykawasaki himself.
Interesting article about an interesting company. But I agree, gathering followers just for the sake of getting more followers is not going to be very useful. Anyhow, good luck to MDF. I found this article in http://www.boilingpage.com that shows the hottest pages on the web. No wonder, MDF is considered to be hot.
Brilliant Million Dollar Idea
See my interview with Jonathan Nelson, the man behind millionDollarFollow.com, http://2above.com/case-study-businesses-using-twitter/restaurants-foodies/from-being-laid-off-to-founderceo-of-twittermass-milliondollarfollow/