The How And Why of Selling a Twitter Sponsorship.

Back on May 28th, I announced that I would be auctioning off a sponsorship of my Twitter profile and feed -- for charity (The David Wright Foundation), of course.

Well, after a week of intense bidding, and a month of creative approvals, Metacafe won the auction with a bid of $1,082.01 (duking it out with VideoEgg) -- and the sponsorship is now live.

You'll note that I insisted that the words 'sponsored by' or 'advertisement' be featured on any Metacafe image, so as not to confuse anyone as to the nature or intent. I actually received the images without those accompanying words, so I added them myself in Photoshop and got Metacafe's approval.

News coverage of this auction reached far and wide, from Mashable to Adverganza to Adrants.

Ev Williams, one of Twitter's founders, even chimed in via a comment on Mashable:

...That said, we're cool with people monetizing their own use of Twitter, in general (as long as they're above-board about it). Because it's all opt-in, if people are annoyed or not getting value, unfollow is easy.

As a side note, and for the record, while we don't mind the community brainstorming, we're not in desperate search for a business model. We have some ideas we'll try out when the time is right, but Twitter isn't going to go away for lack of one any time soon (nor will reliability issues be solved with one)...

From my perspective, the reason for me doing this was clear -- to start a conversation, get marketers looking at emerging technologies, and collaborate on finding ways to monetize them. As I've said before, consumer behavior is evolving faster than advertising, and we run the risk of today's best new technologies running out of funding before finding monetizable solutions.

From Metacafe's perspective, according to Michelle Cox of Metacafe:

Living in the world of social media as we at Metacafe do, we’re always thinking about new ways to reach and engage our target audiences – entertainment enthusiasts, short-form video creators, and advertising agencies and brand marketers. Sponsoring Ian’s Twitter feed for a month is a great way to do just this. And, hey, the money goes to a good cause! We first learned of the opportunity by reading Ian’s blog post, and it immediately struck us as a pretty cool idea. All of us in the digital entertainment and social media industries are focused on figuring out the monetization puzzle – in our business, we work tirelessly to help our clients meet their marketing objectives with innovative campaigns well suited to the short-form video entertainment environment. And, in this case, we appreciate Ian helping us meet ours through this first-of-its-kind sponsorship. Tweet Tweet!

Well said.

What do you think about the way that I went about doing this? About how it turned out? About the amount that was paid?

Lets keep the conversation going, shall we? Comment away...