When I was still new with blogging, I remeber quite clearly this debate about bloggers getting into the “sponsored” type of blogging. Hence the likes of IZEA’s SponsoredPosts, ReviewMe, and there’s another site which I couldn’t recall anymore. Anyway, the point is, these kind of making money online received quite a number of  flaks from those who advocate freedom of expression unbiased writing.  Frankly, I didn’t know what happened the issue died a natural death, until now.

This time the “sponsored” type of model takes the form of today’s most popular online communication facility – Twitter and an attempt to push income-generating schema to it through in-tweet advertising. Guess what, one of the culprits of in-tweet advertising happens to be also one of the prime movers of sponsored posts – Izea with its .  Another company followed suit with their own brand of in-tweet advertising program for Twitter users – Ad.ly.

These two advertising programs are getting the buzz lately either because of two reasons – those who are the early adopters are already earning too much from it and/or it is because these kinds of advertising model are annoying the wit of those Twitter users who are not into it.

Last Sunday, the New York Times run a story about sponsored tweets/in-tweet advertising, citing the likes of John Chow who are already earning a lot from in-tweet advertising via Ad.ly. If I remember it correctly,  John was also previously advocating about SponsoredTweets.

The article might have sparked the ire of some well-known bloggers who are also avid Twitter users – and everybody seemed to have jumped into the issue.

Is in-tweet advertising evil? Should you unfollow Twitter members who engage in such activities. Should these Twitter users put some kind of disclosure when they tweet sponsored ads?

Originally posted on November 23, 2009 @ 4:56 am