Twitter ads — a self-limiting concept?

Twitter is all about limits. If your tweet isn't 180 140 characters or less you can't send it out to your followers. And if you build up your reputation to the point where you have a lot of followers, you might want to monetize it by signing up with a service that tweets ads through your identity to all those followers. There's a guy with 50,000 followers who made $3,000 last month using that service. He gets $200 every time an advertiser takes advantage of those 100,000 eyes.

To be fair, at the end of the tweet there's a little "(ad)," which means you're untricked after you're tricked. But he can only make that much money because he has all those followers. And people are on Twitter — looking for things to read, becoming followers — because there's stuff they want to read and the whole experience of being there feels cool. As ads pollute the experience, people will unfollow the writers they have boosted or they will abandon Twitter altogether and move on to the next cool place.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a lot of people — especially the younger demographic loved by advertisers — tolerate and even almost enjoy a modest infusion of advertising into their reading experience. Did you know that 46% of people 18 to 49 years old don't fast-forward through the commercials when they are watching TV shows on a DVR? They can skip the commercials but they don't!

Once you're used to the fact that there will be ads, maybe you won't mind. Maybe you think it's natural and appropriate for a popular Twitter writer to make money this way. He'll continue and work hard at keeping up the constant twitter of tweets, because there needs to be a sufficient amount of editorial material around the ads and because $36,000 a year is a fine incentive. When an ad comes up in the feed, you may accept it as fair and endure. You're not outraged when a TV show you're watching suddenly goes to commercial. That's the way life is. People who work providing video/words deserve an income. Deal with it.

Or don't. Personally, I don't watch TV shows with commercials. I watch HBO or I record and fast-forward. And I mostly ignore Twitter these days anyway. Ads would just make it feel even less cool that it already felt to me, when ads weren't the problem.