Binary Impact

Olivia Munn getting paid by Bing.com to tweet? and the Future of Twitter [UPDATE]

Posted by Mavrik | Filed under Tech

I’ve seen the above tweet and others like it in my twitter feed this past week from Olivia Munn and couldn’t help but wonder if this was the unfortunate future of Twitter. As you may or may not know, Olivia Munn is the sexy co-host of G4’s flagship program Attack of the Show.  I really enjoy AOTS and Olivia Munn is a big reason for the show’s relative success because let’s face it, geeks are horny.

On most days, Olivia’s Twitter-feed seems to be a fun mix of personal stuff with some additional AOTS/G4 thrown in.  But whatever G4 stuff is mentioned, it serves almost as a behind the scenes more than anything and was never obnoxious.

The above tweet, though, looks like straight up advertising.  This isn’t the only tweet either.  For about a week before Microsoft’s bing.com launch, Olivia had been tweeting about it nonstop.  At first I thought she was just excited that Google has some competition, but then came another tweet, and another.  It isn’t fair, I guess, to assume that Olivia is being compensated in some way for these heavily pro-Bing tweets, but it certainly looks that way.  The reason I’m calling shenanigans is because she has never displayed such excitement to this degree over anything before.

While there is plenty of stuff like this happening on Twitter, it will be very sad if top tweeters start taking money to tweet “ads” without any mention of this compensation.  That would be a very sad day indeed.

UPDATE: And we have our answer: http://bit.ly/FAhXQ (Thanks @timmyjoe)

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Tags: Bing, G4, Internet, Olivia Munn, Twitter