Twitter has recently decided to prohibit any third party ads from appearing in any Twitter user’s stream. What does this mean for the paid tweeting world? Fortunately (yes, I say fortunately because I participate in paid tweeting myself, via Be a Magpie and Sponsored Tweets), it means nothing. At first I panicked and thought, “Great, here’s the end of something good”, but then I took a closer look at the fine print, as did other concerned bloggers and webentrepreneurs. As it turns out, Twitter is simply banning automatically published third party ads. Twitter users are still free to post whatever they want, whenever they want. So if you want to post an ad for aircraft parts & supplies, you’re still welcome to do so. You just need to post it yourself, rather than relying on a Twitter ad network’s API service to do it for you.

So what does this mean for those of us who participate in paid tweeting? Nothing significant, except that we will be required to manually publish third party ads to our Twitter streams, as Twitter is disallowing the use of third party ads to be published automatically through their API.

Read more at TechCrunch.

Sponsored Tweets is a product of IZEA. It’s free to join, and the concept is simple enough: get paid to post paid tweets.

What makes Sponsored Tweets just a little bit different from other pay-to-tweet companies is that for many of the tweets, you write your own ad. There’s a link to include and a general subject to stay on, but you choose the disclosure and how you’d like to present the advertisement (much like you do for a sponsored blog entry).

You also get to set your own price. The program takes a look at the type of content you post and the number of followers you have and suggests a price based on that criteria. You can change it, of course, but if you want to attract advertisers, it’s important not to price yourself too high.

Sponsored Tweets allows you to choose between ads that you write, ads that the advertisers write, or both. You can also select specific categories, and opt to accept mature advertisements.

The minimum cash-out is $50, and after using Sponsored Tweets for a few months, I’m happy to report that I reached that minimum, and was paid promptly.

Be a Magpie is a pay-per-tweet program. You have three options for compensation:

• Pay per view
• Pay per click
• Pay per lead
• Pay per sale

Pay per view is the only type of paid tweet I’m interested in displaying on my timeline, so I checked off the other three, which essentially blocks those types of sweets. I’ve found that while the pay per clicks, leads and especially sales pay well, it’s hard to get any follow-through on them. Also, those advertisers tend to be more prevalent, which means more advertising in your feed. Bottom line: I want to be paid for advertising a natural fat burner, not be paid only if someone clicks a link and purchases the product!

The good news is that Be a Magpie allows you to specify the ratio of personal tweets to paid tweets. The minimum is 5, the max is 200. I think having an ad every 5 or 10 tweets is too much, but to each their own. Just remember that if you lose followers, your Twitter account loses monetary value.

Also? You can opt to pre-approve all tweets before they are posted. And, you can customize the disclosure/notification that is displayed before or after (yes, you choose this to) a paid tweet.

I’m happy to report that Be a Magpie does pay. I first joined in the spring, and after several lulls in activities, finally reached the minimum $50 balance and cashed out last month. Since then there has apparently been an increase in advertisers, as my balance is already back up to $20. Not bad!

Screenshot of Be a Magpie payout.