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There are quite a few twitter ad networks in existence who claim to let you make money doing what you are already doing: tweeting. Some promise to pay you while you tweet about the links they provide, others simply pay you to tweet about stuff, stuff from advertisers in the ad networks. To avoid the negative “soul selling” public images of “tweeting for money (a.k.a, spam tweets)”, 3rd party twitter ad networks have been getting sophisticated on its ways to give users options to choose what to tweet, when to tweet. Although small, TweetROI.com is very particular about it, founder Brian actively blogged about ethic sides of tweeting for money. The two kinds of twitter ad networks, big or small, old or new, are differentiated mainly by the transparency they give back to twitter-er. Following is the a list of such ad networks that worth looking at. (notice that I left out tweetbucks.com, due to its affiliate commission payout mechanism being completely different from other players listed below)

Leading twitter ad networks: RevTwt and TwittAd
1. RevTwt.com

Previously known as TwtAd, RevTwt is the biggest twitter ad networks to date. RevTwt lets you tweet about info and links from advertisers in its network. For example, one ads offered to me is “World of Warcraft – Auction House Mastery ($0.050/click): World of Warcraft – Get Mayley Winter’s Warcraft Auction House Mastery 34pg Free Report Here!”.

It’s understandable that these ads are hardly relevant to what I usually tweet. It remains a challenge to date to find the advertisers that will fit people’s tweeting style. If RevTwt as the biggest twitter ad network can not get my favorite airline to be the advertisers so I can tweet about my last trip, I don’t know who else has more suitable advertisers. Then, of course, if I am a WoW fanatic, it would have been match made in heaven, for 5 penny though.

TwittAd.com

TwittAd is 2nd largest twitter ad network. I like its legitimacy, two options to choose.
Option1: Choose the advertiser, post their tweets, get paid
Option2: Opt-in campaign based on what interests you.

I feel Option 1 has more control for me than option 2. I will definitely give it a try just to have a taste of it.

Smaller ad networks with less options.
Twivert.com, Adcause.com

Both ad networks let you tweet for advertisers during a time slot you choose for the day. Ad cause has been around, possibly the earliest player in this space. However, either the payout amount or inherent marketplace efficiency not as good as top guys, they have quite a catch up to do.

Newcomers, reformers
I consider Sponsoredtwts.com from IZEA (still in beta, lot of hypes from TechCrunch), TweetROI, maybe Paymetweets.com new comers and reformers. All of these sites try to build a relevancy into tweets-as-ads, or recommendation tweets based on twitter-er experiences and interest. I often get a “Thank you” note from product owner accounts on twitter when I tweet about their products, for free. For example, when I twitted I saved $400 a year switching from esurance to progressive, their account manager @progressive dropped me a notes saying “Thanks for switching to Progressive! Glad to have you as our customer!”.

I have been thinking about this for a while. I have two kinds of entrepreneurial friends in real life, the first type is dreamer, or I call them A-lister: they have an idea, or a killer technology, they work really hard and set the goal very high, they get the venture money, often from the best VC in the valley, however it’s not uncommon to not having a penny in income, or not profitable at all. But in the case of sale (being acquired by a larger company), they will get boat load of equity ready to cash out.

The 2nd type of entrepreneur is practical type, or B-lister, similar to the ex you broke up with, not romantic enough. Many of them have their own online ad agencies, some sort of ad networks, marketplaces, and are making CASH left and right, some even get acquired – notice they are in general not good candidates for acquisition due to lack of technology, low entry barrier. The success often comes with the relentless pursuit of founder. And it goes quickly with them as well. I saw many of them before.

Thinking of twitter app founders, I can’t help separating them into these two types. Although the scale may not be as big, trazzler and twazzup are more like the dreamers, while many players in the twitter ad network world, be it “contextual”, or “pay per tweet”, or “twitter account name parking”, are actually making cash, even though their future is questionable and they are not as glamorous.

What kind of entrepreneur are you?

Having seen so many twitter apps in the past couple of months, I have not been wowed more than a few times in a week, but I was seriously wowed three times last week! Among the long list of twitter apps I was looking at, these three twitter apps will charm you. It will make you smile, laugh, or at least slightly richer, if you decide to sell a little bit of your soul. No matter how you feel, these apps are high quality, relatively well thought out, some may have bright future, I think.

My pick of the week:Streaming live from twitter!

Twitcam lets you broadcasting live from your webcam and twit about it, while you are at it broadcasting, you can also chat with your viewers via Twitter right from your broadcast page. This application is not only fun, but can be extremely useful for bloggers, businesses/brands to get one step closer to followers.

My runner up of the week

If you have been on twitter for a while, you know getting a customized twitter profile background is the next fun step that should not be hard to achieve. t.wist.it grabs your flickr’s newest set of photos and automatically set them as your profile background. It’s so easy caveman can do it! My profile had a makeover (with my fabulous photos) before I knew it. Must try!

It’s all about money, again

I have never tried but always been interested in knowing the “ad network” on twitter, there are quite a few of them. Twivert is one of the newest, and is seeing exponential growth last week. Somehow, no matter how many people are against the idea of selling “contextual” ad tweets (it’s like selling your soul, according to one of the bloggers who are against it), ad networks continue to grab a lot of traffic, although I really don’t know the # for the actual monetary transactions. In its own words, Twivert provides “value ads” which you can share with your friends through twitter. When someone clicks on these ads you get paid, thats it.