TwitterMass Goes to Auction: Is It Worth It?

“[TwitterMass] is evil!  -Loic Lemeur

Right now, if you’re a developer and out of work, you need to be working on your own Twitter application. The ability to rapidly launch an application, monetize it and then turn it over for cash has never been easier.

I’ve been playing around, re-aquainting myself with the Twitter API lately, as I talked a bit about yesterday. I’ve also been monitoring the various web forums where a lot of these sales often take place, and almost without fail, Twitter applications of varying complexity and usefulness get snapped up at most a few days after they’re put up for sale (as long as they’re priced reasonably).

That’s why I’m not surprised that TwitterMass has chosen to put themselves up for sale right now while the hype is hot, but I am a bit surprised at the price: $250,000 (the BIN). The bidding is currently up to $13,000, but there’s plenty of time for the price to get to where it needs to be, since it’s a 30-day auction with 27 days left.

Is it a good deal? Let’s take a look at the metrics they’re offering for public view.

They say they’re pulling down 30,000 uniques a month, and ~150,000 pageviews. They also say that they’ve leveraged that into an income of $6,000 already – not the best monetization stats. There really isn’t a whole lot of ads being sold on the site, though, as the main focus is to drive users to purchase the service at the $99 pricepoint.

With better ad placement and representation (as part of a larger portfolio of sites or represented by a higher quality ad firm), monetization could easily add another $2,000 a month at current traffic levels.

There’s also an issue of scaling involved to consider.  Jesse Stay’s SocialToo does some of the same things that this product does, and he’s run into a number of problems providing those services without continually running into the API limitations of Twitter. Whomever takes this purchase is going to have to plan for scaling in that regard as well as scaling of the site as well, which is written in Ruby.

Could it make easily $100k a year?  It could.  Not easily, but it could. Costs on this project are undoubtedly going to rise, and the $250k pricetag is a bit unproven, given it only has one month’s track record.

My advice is that if this company appeals to you and looks like it’d fit in well with your portfolio, try to win it in auction, but forgo the “buy-it-now” pricetag.

[hat tip to Allen Stern @ CenterNetworks]