When we first looked at MillionDollarFollow, a new Twitter advertising network with some interesting twists, we couldn’t help but compare it to the Million Dollar Homepage. MillionDollarFollow (MDF) is quite different, however. Instead of advertising a product or tweeting affiliate links, MDF tries to get its users more followers. Rather than thinking about MDF as an advertising network, it’s actually probably best to think about it as a Twitter lottery with some added benefits, even if you don’t win. An ad on MDF costs $1, and users who buy an ad are regularly entered into a lottery drawing where they can win new followers. The final winner will receive 1 million followers.
MillionDollarFollow was developed by Jonathan Nelson, who is also behind Twittermass, the auto-follow product we wrote about a few weeks ago.
MDF uses the Twitter OAuth protocol, so your login and password are safe, but, when you buy an ad, you also authorize MDF to send a tweet about your ad to your Twitter stream.
It should be noted that when you sign up for MDF, you do authorize the service to automatically subscribe you to up to 150 Twitter users (there are 150 drawings in total). You can check the FAQ for more details about how the system works. Advertisers can also put a MDF widget on their homepages, which is obviously designed to give MDF more exposure, but, as Jonathan tells us, it can also increase a user’s chance of winning.
10 cents from every one dollar ad will be donated to Malaria No More.
How Will the Twittersphere React?
Of course, just having followers for the sake of it is not exactly the best way to find interesting people to interact with on Twitter (and might not be what Twitter is all about to begin with), so it will be interesting to watch how the Twittersphere reacts to this experiment. Feel free to let us know what your thoughts about MDF are in the comments here.
If anything, we hope that those 1 million followers will go to somebody who has something interesting to say…
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis, Jolie O’Dell, and Phil Glockner.
