As you may have noticed, we have lauched a Public Service Announcement-type campaign to support those in Haiti. You can find more details at http://assetize.com/haiti.

This campaign not only encourages your followers to donate money through one of the accredited aid agencies (e.g. CARE and the Red Cross), but Assetize will also be donating money every time one of your followers retweets our message or changes their background.

We’re doing our part and also encouraging others to do the same. For example, if an advertise launches a campaign on the Assetize network, we have commited to donating 100% of the money towards Haiti and will pay out publishers ourselves.

If you do know of any advertisers who are thinking about social network marketing, please pass this along – it’s like free advertising for them while their money ends up as a donation to a great cause.

Twitter has published some new rules regarding affiliate marketing, which can be found here:http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915

Here are some excerpts we would like to bring to your attention:

Feeds of your own blog: It’s generally fine to automate your account with updates of your own content; just be sure to review the Twitter Rules before setting up your automation…

Feeds for community benefit: We welcome feeds that are used for community benefit or provide non-commercial information to a niche group of users, such as local weather feeds or transit information….

Automated or mass-created affiliate advertising is not permitted on Twitter…

Updates that are posted automatically to your account through a tool or third-party application, for which you are compensated (whether on a “per-click,” “per-sale,” “per-tweet,” or other basis), are prohibited…

All sponsored or paid updates must be manually approved

From the above, you’ll notice that using Assetize to post news content on your account is completely acceptable. However, they do require that all ads sent through accounts must be approved each time.

Our goal is to work within Twitter’s Terms of Service so that you can continue to see the benefits of your valuable Twitter account. As such, we’ll be making the following changes:
1) Assetize will no longer publish ads automatically through accounts in-stream. All ads will first be sent to publishers for approval, and will then be posted. Due to this change, you will see fewer ads within your stream.
[We have asked for, and received, permission from Twitter to run the Haiti in-stream campaign (more below), so these will continue to run in an automated fashion]
2) If you use RSS feeds to send out content through Assetize, all content links will show an ad bar on the destination pages. You may have already noticed this, as we have been testing it out with a few valuable accounts. Users will now be paid based on a combination of an account’s influence, as well as the number of times their content gets clicked — a CPM-like model.

To see examples of this format, visit our homepage at http://assetize.com. Not only does this keep you earning money, but is a much less intrusive and less interruptive solution for your followers!

Mark Twain said the above after reading his own obituary in the New York Journal, but he might as well have been talking about advertising as a revenue model for news publishers.

Publishers have all lost large sums of ad revenue, of course – $7.5B is a BIG number for anyone (except Wall Street bankers looking for TARP money). But Robert Niles wrote a great blog post recently discussing the 3 revenue models for journalism, and how they’re not going to change:

1. Direct purchases, such as subscriptions, copy sales and tickets

2. Advertising

3. Donations, including direct contributions and grant funding

His thoughts on #2, Advertising:

Despite fears about the death of advertising, I say that there will always be people willing to pay to gain access to others’ audiences. That, distilled, is the definition of advertising.

Social media may provide a new ways for retailers and other business to speak directly to customers and would-be customers, but as anyone who’s started a Twitter feed with no followers can attest – building an audience is hard. Buying access to an established audience that you’re not now reaching is, for businesses with money, a far easier way. Advertising endures.

Online, advertising takes new forms – from banner ads to interstitials to affiliate links – but none of these forms are fundamentally different from any form of advertising that has come before. They remain a way for a publisher to sell access to its audience to another. So long as a publisher builds an audience, it will have the ability to rent access to it to advertisers. At which price point the publisher will be able to do that will depend upon the audience, and the amount of competition also reaching that audience.

What does this all mean for publishers?

It means that, although ad revenues may be declining for publishers, they’re not dead… nor are they going to die anytime soon. As revenues decline for print and other mediums, publishers need to focus harder on the value that they’re creating through new distribution channels, and then move quickly to monetize these. Access to a publisher’s captive audience is always going to be valuable to advertisers, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Happy Assetizing,
Saif

Charlie needs new shoes!

Professional athletes, including ones from the NBA and NFL, are looking to connect with sponsors. Want to help?

Assetize is looking for a Business Development Lead to pursue relationships with large and small brands.  These brands would act as sponsors for tier 1 athletes and their social accounts.

Here’s why it’s a job you’ll love:

• Assetize is in the hottest space around – it’s the intersection of a multi-billion dollar industry (advertising) and the next billion dollar company (Twitter).  You could be the one defining how this space evolves
• Wicked new offices at the corner of Yonge St. & King St. in downtown Toronto
• Surrounded by brilliant minds, and we don’t mean us.  The office is shared with a VC, a YCombinator-type incubator program, numerous other startups, and a mobile consulting company that’s constantly wow’ing the world with their apps. The place oozes brainpower, while still being fun-loving
• Base salary, and performance bonuses

Here’s what you’ve got to be, to make the cut:

• Relentless. We need to get things done, and the only thing that matters is results. You’ve got to be ok with hearing ‘no’ from a brand 9 times, and still call a 10th time so they say ‘yes’ to you out of exhaustion
• Energetic beyond belief. People should be sick of being around you first thing in the morning, but miss you when you’re not around
• Flexible. We’re a startup, so chances are you’ll be doing more than just what’s on this post
• Willing to play the high risk / high reward game that startups live everyday

You should be ready to interview and start immediately.  Apply by emailing me your resume and a 2 paragraph blurb about why you’d be great for the job. Here’s a tip: the blurb carries as much weight as the resume, so make it count. Resumes state facts about your past jobs. We want to know why you’d be awesome for this job.  Email address: saif at assetize.com.

Know someone who’d be great for the gig? Pass it along and win $100 if we hire them. Or we’ll regift something that we didn’t like from Christmas.  Kidding mom, I loved that sweater! <sigh>

Cheers,
Saif

Ka-Ching!

That’s right – it’s Payday for Assetizers today!

If you are monetizing your Twitter account using our service and have earned more than $10, your Paypal balance should now be that much higher!

In line with our advertiser agreements, we pay out all earnings after a 30 day waiting period. This allows all sides to verify performance and receive payments. Today, you should have received payment for all your earnings up to 8/31/2009. Please contact us if there were any discrepancies.

We look forward to paying out more in the coming months! (After all, if you do well, we do well)

Happy earning,

Saif

Last week was a great one for Assetize, as we were invited to present at DemoCamp and were also covered by a couple of great bloggers.

DemoCamp (9/24): While Yossi Vardi was the main attraction, getting a chance to pitch to a crowd of ~200 at DemoCamp Toronto was a great experience for us. A special thanks to all the attendees who approached us after the presentation to offer valuable feedback. It reassures us that we’re building a real solution for a real problem, and are in an exciting space.

[Photo Credit: Farhan Thawar]

Aside: Two great quotes from the always-funny Yossi Vardi:

1) “Who here uses instant messaging? Thanks for your business; I sold each of you for $84.” [Yossi was the founding investor for ICQ]

2) Extending Isaac Newton’s quote – ”If I have achieved anything, it’s by standing on the shoulders of children.” [Yossi is still an active investor in Israel, and often funds young entrepreneurs]

StartupNorth (9/24): Our new Ad Network service received coverage here. David Crow is well-read blogger and is well-connected in the Canadian startup scene, so we’re glad to have made the cut!

Twitterrati (9/25): Mark Evans and Twitterrati also wrote about us, which you can read here. His coverage has been very helpful in getting the word out – the post has been retweeted numerous times!

Thanks to all that have covered us over the last few months, and given us the opportunity to present what we believe is a valuable service to users and companies alike. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Saif

Hi Everyone,

Sorry that I’ve been slow to blog recently but, as you’ll notice, we’ve been busy making big changes to our site. We have built out our ad network functionality, and are focused on being the best targeted ad network for Twitter (check out some real examples on our site).

For those users who have been inquiring about our Buy/Sell service, we have decided to turn this functionality off for the time-being. Since these actions were against Facebook’s and Twitter’s TOS, we thought it was best to focus on ways of monetization that added value to not only our users but also the social networks. We are confident that by creating a proprietary technology that offers targeted and relevant ads, we have now done this.

If you haven’t signed up for our new account monetization service yet, give it a try. Most of our users have already made more money through this than they did through Buy/Sell. It’s a win-win for all!

Hope this clears up why the services have changed.

Happy Assetizing,

Saif

Hello Assetizers,

We’re happy to report some new coverage that our Twitter Parking service has received. Read the TechCrunch article here. I think Daniel did a great job capturing the essence.

Readers have raised some interesting issues in the Comments section of the TC article, and we thought it would be a good idea to address some of them here.

First, be sure that the Parking and Buy/Sell services are separate, so any accounts that are ‘parked’ will not be listed on our site for others to see without your permission. While monetized accounts are certainly more appealing when sold (and hence, a connection between the two service can be made), we will not force this connection on users or list parked accounts automatically.

Second, a little background on why we’re optimistic re: Twitter’s TOS. There are already services that provide users with content (e.g. YoTwits, Twitterfeed) and services that provide users with the ability to monetize their accounts (e.g. TweetROI and Twittad). Assetize’s parking service simply marries the two concepts. We’re hopeful that since Twitter has accepted the above services, they’ll be accepting of ours as well.

Our goal remains to help users monetize their social accounts, and we thought this would be a good step towards that. Thoughts? Would love to hear from you in the Comments section.

Talk soon,
Saif

Most Twitter accounts are inactive. Is yours? You can make money without lifting a finger.

Assetize has introduced a new way for you to monetize your social accounts: Twitter Account Parking! [Our interns call it the Bird's Nest. Pretty clever of them]

How can you park your account? Follow these simple steps:

1. Provide your account information

2. Give us keywords related to your account. We’ll use these to make sure that the content we provide is relevant. (Your only step*)

3. We provide the content and insert periodic ads

4. You make money

*Seriously, that’s it. You might want to come back and check your earnings once in a while though. Seeing your account balance grow is always soothing for the soul.

We’re currently in beta and sending out invites daily. To learn more or request an invite, visit http://assetize.com/park

Happy parking,

Saif

Greetings Assetizers!

We’re excited to announce two updates to our site:

1) You can now request accounts that aren’t already listed on Assetize – either directly from our homepage or following a search. We act as your broker in contacting the owner, and you still benefit from our escrow services to guarantee safe transfers.

A special thanks to all the users who suggested this in our Feedback Forum!

2) In the most obvious of changes, we’ve got a new UI! If you don’t remember what we used to look like, here are Before and After screenshots:

Before

After

Talk soon,
Saif