Twittad lets you sell Twitter pages no one looks at
There is now an online ad network for Twitter backgrounds. Launched last week, ad startup Twittad allows Twitter users to sell their background image as ad space and charge advertisers based on how many followers they have. Back in June, Ian Schafer, the CEO of interactive agency Deep Focus, sold his Twitter background as advertising space for $1,082.01. Ridiculous, we thought — since the background only appears when Twitter users visit the company's website to look at another user's profile, or read a specific message on the website. Twitter's website accounts for about 5 percent of the service's usage, and users mostly read pages with streams of all their friends' messages, on which individual backgrounds don't appear.Never mind that! When Schafer sold his Twitter background, Commenter Gregnog told us to quiet down and "just nod, smile and take the check." Well, Gregnog, wherever you are, now's your chance. Using Twittad, Rishi Lakhani, who has 305 Twitter followers, just sold the rights to choose his background image for the next 7 days for $30.00. Even if all 305 of those followers visited Rishil's page over the next seven days — and trust us, they won't — that's a fantastically high, unlikely to be repeated $100 CPM, or cost per thousand impressions. Most social networks are lucky to get a single-digit CPM.