$1 million for a Twitter background: sold!

11/06/2011

A young man of 20 monetized his Twitter account in an unusual way. It was not just selling tweets. He put up his Twitter background for sale for $ 1 mil. A rather stupid and unrealizable idea turned out to be one of the most successful in the history of Twitter.

@fruitblob has told his friends about the idea and placed only one ad somewhere in the web. The result didn`t take long to appear. Seven months passed. Three large companies and one corporation contacted him in order to buy the place for advertising (the right to place their own background in his Twitter account), but they were late. A couple of days before, in June, 2011 the background was sold to some anonymous businessman who turned out to be a fan of Chelsea FC.  Now one can observe 8 Chelsea badges on the background.

The guy earned $ 1 000 000 for the background (they say the money went to charity). He is now selling the link under his bio in Twitter. In fact, any link is more functional than a background. Chelsea fan might have waited a little to buy it instead of a background) Anyway, the price is the same – the guy is sure to get another million.

This story resembles Alex Tew`s “The Million Dollar Homepage”. The image-based links on his site were sold for $1 per pixel. The guy just wanted to help his parents and to pay for his education. His project was cloned many times, but no similar site reached a success. Why is that so? All those projects failed, because they lacked for social movement. Alex Tew`s site is stagnating now and Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Myspace accounts are constantly expanding every day. That is why Twitter-based and other social network marketing projects have more chances to be successful, than isolated sites.  

  Internet marketing seems to acquire a new trend. Instead of selling ads and links at low prices, people invent immediate methods of getting rich, selling the same ads and links for big money. Social networking services gradually supersede all other web resources. Thus, people want to wage their promotional campaigns in Twitter (200+ million users), Facebook (600+ million users) and Myspace (30+ million users). We live in a new era of social marketing. Such people as Guy Kawasaki (360 000 followers), Robert Scoble (180 000 followers),  Charlie Sheen with his Twitter advertising (4 million followers) and @fruitblob with his million dollar twitter background form the basis of social marketing.  

       
Tags: Washington Post, Twitter News, New York Times Twitter, Twitter Background, Million Dollar Twitter Background