Attack of the Parasitic Ad Network

A new German company is offering innovative ways to buy and sell public discourse.

Cuddly sounding Magpie & Friends Ltd. will pay Twitter users to insert targeted ads among their regularly scheduled micro-blog dispatches. The ads are punched in automatically, and use text straight from the advertiser. Hence, a Twitterer’s musings on consumer technologies might be punctuated with, oh, let’s say, “I <3 Bic Coosh headphones!” Participants, naturally, get more cash based on the size of their audience and their rate of posting.

How much are we talking about? Not a lot. An advertiser might pay as little as a few cents per sponsored tweet, to as much as around ten bucks to co-opt a highly prolific and well trafficked Twitterer.

What is distressing and fascinating here goes beyond a conventional diatribe about treating what is supposed to be an outlet for genuine social interaction as a hyper-capitalist meat market. That’s no good, but it’s hardly unique. The singularity of Magpie is the way in which it functions as a parasite that, if it’s successful, may actually kill its host.

The only thing Twitter really has going for it is its earnestness — it presents itself as a surrogate for real conversation. As soon as it becomes clear that surreptitious manipulations are infiltrating its discourse, it loses its one social function. As such, Magpie’s attempts to cash in on it could drive enough people away to topple both endeavors.

As companies search for new ways to wring money from the internet, one can easily imagine a swarming of similarly short-sighted, parasitic “ad networks” attaching themselves to popular social networking applications, utterly ruining them in the process.

I think we’d be well advised to steer clear of these manipulative and potentially destructive practices.