TweetMeme is simple in concept: aggregate the number of times a certain blog URL, picture, video, or sound file is linked to on Twitter and rank them in order. The site is clean, fast and easy to use. But what it didn’t have before was a way to make any money.
That has now changed with its latest update, which adds a ‘Sponsored tweet’ area in the upper-right corner of the page. According to the TweetMeme blog post, sponsors can ‘promote’ a story link as frequently as every 24 hours to appear in the box. These sponsored links also appear in the RSS feed (appropriately denoted), increasing the likelihood of folks clicking on them. Currently the sponsor program is accepting trial users here.
TweetMeme takes the TechMeme model and adapts it nicely, using Twitter as its source of news. Even the new revenue model echoes TechMeme’s advertising system. We do like the democratic process it uses to find fresh new content without giving too much weight up front to authority. However, if you like that sort of thing, TweetMeme also has a leaderboard page where it tracks a spin of this concept, weighting the freshest sources first. Louis Gray posted about those features last month.
TweetMeme has not been sitting still with other refinements and features either. They recently rolled out a mobile version of their site, as well as a promotional site button and WordPressplugin.
