Knowing the value of a web-celeb’s Twitter account will have to be on hold. Andrew Baron, founder of the well-known video podcast Rocketboom, placed his name-brand account up for sale on eBay last week, but has since deleted the auction listing.
Andrew Baron, Creator of Rocketboom
(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)
Despite eBay’s own issues with the auction, reports say Baron had concerns over potentially spammy prospectors using his account to bombard his now 1,700-plus followers with marketing messages. If you were keeping tabs on the auction, at the time of deletion the highest bid equated to a bit over a dollar per follower, all of whom would be likely to un-follow as soon as they found out they were being targeted.
Add to that whom he follows, though, and you have around 3,000 eyeballs, which makes a message the price of a stamp.
Though no one is certain how successful a spam campaign would be on Twitter anyway, it makes one wonder if a person’s followers are worth that dollar amount, and what Baron’s particular list would accomplish beyond what automated scripts other Twitterers appear to be using would.
Over the past few days, Baron tweeted plans to delete his auction listing before eBay called to inform him of their new digital product policies, which required him to move the listing to another part of the site. Some had wondered if the sale would be a violation of eBay’s terms of service. Craigslist, after all, had deleted a similar listing.
“There are only 8 documented cases of ‘I got a call from ebay’ on Google,” Baron humorously tweets. Now Google+Search”>there are nine, the second result from Baron’s Twitter account, which sort of raises a whole other issue surrounding Twitter’s value.
Other, more recent tweets are cryptic, suggesting perhaps there is another deal in the works to hammered out this weekend. The mystery and weirdness surrounding the issue have led critics to accuse Baron of staging a kind of publicity stunt. When murdok asked him, though, he denied it. “I would say it’s not at all a stunt,” he said.
