TweetBucks: Good for business or good for Twitter abuse?

There’s a new affiliate on the prowl, and it means serious business – at least for itself. TweetBucks has come up with a great business model to leverage Twitter to make itself money. Marketers who use TweetBucks “make 70% of the affiliate commissions every time a click on your shortened link results in a sale” (quoted from the TweetBucks site). If you use their ad system, you also get a cut of the CPM from the ads, too.

Who’s the winner here? TweetBucks, definitely. Let’s do some simple math with the following simplified assumptions.

• 1 million users
• Average affiliate product price $20
• Affiliate fee 10%
• 1 Unit sales per affiliate per month

Under these simplistic numbers, the cash flow would look like:

• $20M total sales/month
• $2 M affiliate revenue/month

Applying TweetBuck’s 30%, yields Tweetbucks $600,000/month.

I’m hoping someone who has used the service will comment and include more details from a user perspective. At first glance it looks like a great model for TweetBucks. That 30% comes from TweetBucks being a “super affiliate” where they sign-on as affiliates for all the products and issue revenue checks based on everyone using their affiliate links.

Why wouldn’t you instead sign up as an affiliate and get your 100%? Well that’s the beauty of their system. They do the work for you – signing up for all the affiliate programs, providing the link shortener/converter, and you don’t need a website or need to update your HTML or optimize your affiliate products. It’s a decent trade off if you don’t already have a system to use your affiliate links on Twitter.

So if you want to try affiliate marketing and have a user base, TweetBucks may be an easy way to get started with some potential for supplemental income.

With TweetBucks, Twitter again shows that it has potential for business, but like all business uses of Twitter, it has serious potential to generate spam and annoy the users that depend on it for relevant and timely information. It will be curious to see if TweetBucks can provide a real value to businesses through the affiliate channel or if it will becomes an automated weapon of Twitter spam and a bane to normal Twitter users.

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