I’m here with Dusty Reagan who is the founder of FeaturedUsers.com. He and I together thought it would be a great idea to do an interview to talk about Featured Users, how it came about, and how it works. So, thanks Dusty.

Sure, thank you.

Tell me a little bit about why you decided to start Featured Users.

The way it all started was one weekend I had a need to see my followers list, who I was following and wasn’t following me back, and who was following me and I wasn’t following back. At the time I would do this by paging through the following list and the followers list inside of Twitter, you could view 50 or so people at a time, and check to see if you could DM them back or not. This was very tedious, so I wanted to build a solution just to speed it up for me, primarily. I didn’t really expect it to be a product.

One weekend I sat down and cranked out the first version of Friend or Follow, which shows you who you’re following that’s not following you back, your mutual relationships, and vice versa, in a clear tab view. So I tweeted about that, and my friends started using it and they really liked it, and then word spread virally, and traffic built and built. I had to move servers a couple of times because it got bigger and bigger. Eventually, after it had been around for a month or so, I realized that I could monetize that traffic. I just had to figure out how. So the first thing I did was I threw Google AdSense on it, which didn’t work very well because there was no contextual words for it to key in on. So the ads were not very targeted, and the click through rates were pretty poor. I tried different ad networks, and they did a little better, maybe 10 bucks a month.

Did that even pay for the server?

Oh no. At the time I was getting 14 or 1500 uniques a month. That went on and I was trying to think of different ways to monetize. While this was going on, Conjunctured is going on as well, another one of my adventures*. So I’m cruising around on Twitter and I find a website called TwitterCounter.com. On the very first page it shows you a graph of how many followers you have, and there’s a default person on there. And it just so happened that the default person was somebody I knew, so I thought great, maybe I can talk to these guys and they’ll slap Conjunctured on there, and that will promote our brand. I emailed them and asked what it would take to get Conjunctured on there, and the guy wrote me back, and at the time it was $100 a month or a week, I can’t recall. The first thing I thought was, that’s too expensive for Conjunctured, because we don’t have any money, but I’ve got FriendorFollow, and I’ll slap Conjunctured on FriendorFollow. So I did, the Conjunctured Twitter account. I hadn’t really thought of that as being a monetizing means for FriendorFollow at the time, I was just trying to promote my other business venture.

Eventually, people started emailing me, asking me how to get their profile up there. So I was quoting them day rates, and the day rate kept going up, the more demand I got. People were booking big blocks of time, and I had several months booked. What I wanted to do was automate that process so people could buy it instantly, rather than having to inquire with me. I envisioned a tool where people would buy impressions and it would automatically get displayed on Friend or Follow, and it would randomly rotate through the sponsors. When I decided to build this I realized that this could be applied to all sorts of different Twitter apps, as it was a problem that all Twitter app developers have.

…finding some revenue.

Right. And this was a technology solution.

And it’s automatically contextual, unlike Google AdSense.

Right. Because anybody that goes to a Twitter app site is going to have a Twitter account, and there’s a high chance that they’ll follow you. So that’s pretty much how it got started. It was a solution for Friend or Follow.

So now you have, how many Twitter Apps are using Featured Users right now?

Thirty.

And you call these publishers, because they’re publishing the impressions. Now, just define impression for everybody.

An impression is, at least in the banner ad/marketing world, whenever your banner ad appears in front of a user. So when somebody sees your banner ad, that’s an impression.

Let’s talk about some of the other terms associated with Featured Users. Define CPM.

CPM is the unit cost, the cost per thousand impressions.

Which is what, now?

At the moment it’s $10 per 1,000, and there’s a discount at $30, and a discount at $100.

Another term that people see a lot is click-through rates. Explain click-through rate.

The click-through rate is the percentage of people that click on your banner. So your banner is displayed to a set amount of eyes, and a certain percentage of those people that see your banner are going to click on it. That percentage is the  click-through rate.

So, what’s a good click-through rate for somebody who’s using Featured Users?

For Featured Users, the click-through rate is about 0.9% on average, which is pretty high for a banner ad. I think that’s because the vertical is so tight.

One other thing that Featured Users does, that I don’t think everybody realizes, is they have a featured charity of the month. Tell me about how that came about.

One of the things that I did on Friend or Follow, was along with booking time, when the time was down I would put up some charity or whatever that I wanted to promote. Just wanting to continue that and give back to the community, once a month we pick a charity that has a Twitter account, and we promote their Twitter account on the Featured Users network. It’s free for the charity, and they get x amount of impressions per day, and they also get their banner ads at cost, which is defined by what I pay the publishers, so I don’t get any margin on charity impressions.

How has the feedback been from your users?

Our feedback has been great so far. I’m looking for ways currently to engage the Featured Users community more so that I can keep making improvements to the site and the service.

Is geo targeting a new feature?

It’s been out for about a month or so.

How does that work?

Geo targeting uses your Twitter profile location to determine where you are on the planet, and then right before a banner is served on a publisher’s website, we take the IP address and get a general idea of where that IP address is coming from, and if there’s a sponsor in that area we display that sponsor’s ad to that user. So if, for instance, somebody goes to visit Friend or Follow, that’s from Austin, and we’ve got a couple of sponsors that are from Austin, they have a much higher chance of being shown to that user. As it turns out, people like to follow other people that are in their proximity.

Friend or Follow sort of remains the app behind the app. How is Friend or Follow doing these days?

It’s doing really well. We’re around 5,000 uniques a month.

How would a potential publisher get in touch with you?

On the website, under the publisher’s section, there’s a spot where they can register. When they register we get notified, and we look at their website to make sure that it’s Twitter related. Then we approve it and contact them by email.

And how about someone who wants to be featured? Is it a relatively easy process as well?

Absolutely. Just type in your username, and that’s all there is to it. Type in your username and pay via PayPal. We pull all your data from Twitter. One of the benefits to Featured Users is that normally as a brand, whenever you decide you want to start doing banner ad marketing, you have to have the creative. There’s cost in building that. With Featured Users you don’t have to incur that cost. We just pull all your data and design your banner that way. That’s one of the nice things about it, is it’s pretty easy to start marketing yourself.

And how long does somebody’s $10/thousand impressions last?

Right now it lasts about two and a half days. It’s on what we call an impression burn rate limiter, which is a really fancy name. What it does is it insures that your impressions aren’t burned up really quickly, so it spreads out evenly over two and a half days. We have adjusted the burn rate for people who want it to go faster or slower. Right now that’s a manual process, and people have to request to have that done. In the near future that will be an option that the user can set themselves, so if you want to have a blitzkrieg campaign you can turn your impressions up all the way, or if you want your impressions to last for a lifetime, you can turn them down as slow as you want.

Who would benefit most from using Featured Users?

I think people who are trying to promote their personal brand, and then just brands in general. Both of those groups.

Okay. Well thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me Dusty!

You bet.

*Editor’s note: Conjunctured is a coworking space in Austin, Texas, which opened in 2008. Dusty is one of the four co-founders.

Tags: apps, brands, development, followers, personal branding, Twitter