Advertising on Twitter? Making money by tweeting presents potential ethical dilemma for users

Advertising is making its way into users' tweets on Twitter. This raises ethical questions for many users of the popular micro-blogging service. This weekend in the Sunday New York Times Business section ran an article about Ad.ly, a service that sends automatic scheduled tweets with advertisements in your Twitter stream. The ads are vetted by both the publisher (tweeter) and the advertiser beforehand. Advertisers can get access to a wide audience, especially via celebrity Twitter streams - several have over 1 million followers, for example - but also to users who may have a much smaller, yet very engaged, Twitter following. Higher relative visibility and frequency of retweets means potentially more bang for advertisers' bucks by accessing the millions of smaller tweeters. Similar services are Sponsored Tweets (by Izea, the infamous Pay Per Post company) and Peer2. These services emphasize full disclosure in each tweet, with phrases like "brought to you by," "sponsored by," or tweet hashtags and closings like #ad or (ad):