It was only a matter of time before it had to happen.

A way to monetize with Twitter has been developed by a European company called Magpie. The idea is much like that of ads showing up in blog posts. You give permission to Magpie to gain access to your Twitter account and they in turn pay you when they tweet an ad that advertisers pay them for.

At first thought I was a little, no… make that very skeptical of such a thing. But, the more I think about it and check out in my own Twitter timeline just how intrusive it is, I have decided to give it a try. The set up is painless and incredibly quick.

Magpie Setup For Twitter Cash

The first thing is to get a quick estimate of how much you could possible earn with Magpie. From there you give Magpie your Twitter password and you’re rockin’.

Once Magpie has access you can then set up what intervals you would like the Magpie adds to show. You can choose to have them sent out every other tweet or in between every twenty tweets. There are also other options like after every five, or ten, tweets. I think this will really help with the number of Magpie tweetads that show up.

It’s easy to distinguish the Magpie tweets from the regular tweets also as each one will begin with #magpie . From the estimates that Magpie gave me, it seems that you can probably make $400 to $500 (USD) a month if you are a heavy user and have a good sized following.

But… is Magpie Going To Be A Good Thing?

Only time will tell. I am trying it out right now on a trial basis to see if I begin to lose followers because of it. I’m a little worried that people (spammers) will crawl all over this and inundate Twitter with a bunch of useless tweets just to get to the #magpie. Or, regular Twitter users will begin to drastically increase their own Twitter use for the same reason, thus causing Magpie to go bankrupt or out of business.

I’m sure that there are going to be people who will be pretty upset about this and will unfollow those who sign up for this revenue stream. I even thought that too when I first found out about it. However, if things are kept to a 20 tweet per 1 ad ratio I don’t see how that could be all that intrusive.

But, like I said… time will tell.