I’ve read Marketing Pilgrim daily for close to three years now, ever since Robert Scoble recommended them as part of his daily reading list.  Over the years, he’s been pretty vocally against services like BeAMagpie, claiming that they’ll off him a good opportunity to “to clean up my follow list on Twitter should it really take off,” intimating that anyone using the service would earn an un-follow from him.

[Update: As Andy points out in the comments, this quote didn’t come from Andy himself, but one of his writers, Andy Pratt.  My bad. –mrh]

This morning, though, it appears he’s discovered Ad.ly, a new entrant into the twitterstream monetization space. He thinks that this is the one he’s finally going to try, and lists the reasons why:

I decide how much to charge for each ad campaign. Ad.ly profiles me to ensure the submitted ads are targeted to my audience. I decide which individual ads are approved to publish to my Twitter stream. Ad.ly inserts just 1 tweet in my feed every other day for 7 days. All ads are clearly labeled as such.

What’s particularly entertaining about this 180 is that none of this is unique to Ad.ly.  I should know.  I’ve been signed up since day one on Izea’s platform as well as Magpie and Twittads. In every case, you have the same ability to determine how much per tweet you’ll accept, which ads are approved, and you’re always encouraged to match ads up to the makeup of your audience.

What I really think is going on here is Andy’s slow but sure acceptance, as most of his peers are also doing, of in-stream advertising on Twitter.

The room was polled at the Blogworld expo panel discussing the new FTC blogger regulations on the topic of sponsored tweets. Chris Crum of WebProNews wrote:

WebProNews attended a keynote at the BlogWorld Expo this week, which dealt with the FTC’s forthcoming regulations. Among the speakers were Ted Murphy, CEO of the controversial IZEA, the company known for PayPerPost and sponsored tweeting, Wendy Piersall of Sparkplugging.com, Jennifer Leggio, a blogger for ZDNet and Lisa Rotkin, an attorney from LA. Interestingly, about 60% of people in the room were for sponsored tweets, with very few indicating that they were against it.

We’re way past the debate stage at this point where we’re wondering whether or not we’ll have ads on Twitter.  Now the question is whether or not you’ll be getting money from it and whether you’ll use it as a marketing channel in your social media marketing initiatives or not.

See Also: How To Become Fabulously Wealthy From Ads in your Twitter-stream