Ad.ly is Lacking in Important Ways
I have been using both Ad.ly and SponsoredTweets for some time to monetize Twitter, they are like the new paid posts. If you remember when John Chow taught everyone to sponsor posts on their sites until Google determined this was bad and punished every site that had paid posts. But this time Google doesn’t matter and Twitter is allowing the practice of paid tweets. The big two companies in this advertising area are Ad.ly and SponsoredTweets. If you are not signed up, you should. As long as you do not have issue with promoting products to your Twitter followers.
When checking how much money I have made the past month through each service I realized something about Ad.ly, it is terrible. After searching for some reviews of Ad.ly for comparison, I came across this one from One-Forty. They don’t rate it very well but only give one of the two main issues that I have with the service.
Issue #1: You don’t make any money with Ad.ly. Is comparison to SponsoredTweets were you receive multiple tweet request on a weekly basis, with Ad.ly you might receive 3 requests a month. The amount paid for the tweets is much less on Ad.ly also. And they do not have the newest pay-per-click options that SponsoredTweets now offers.
Issue #2: They close your accounts. I started with 16 accounts a little over 6 months ago. Over the past two months I have lost (?) 5 accounts. What do I mean? I mean my account login no login exists. And using an email to log into a Twitter service is somewhat backwards. Can you start to use OAUTH so that my Ad.ly account and my Twitter account have the same login? Please.
Over at Winning the Web Gyutae Park likes Ad.ly better than SponsoredTweets and he wrote this back in late 2009. Possibly he has changed his opinion because from my experience since I joined both services, SponsoredTweets is the only one worth the time and effort.