Last night, just after midnight mountain time, actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to accumulate more than 1 million followers — winning the race he challenged CNN to by video on Apr. 14.
As Kutcher crossed the 1 million follower mark, CNNbrk, which posts current headlines (but not links) from CNN breaking news stories, had just over 998,000 followers.
In his Apr. 14 challenge, Kutcher said: “I just thought that was just kind of an amazing comment on the state of our media, and I said that, if I beat CNN to 1 million viewers, then I would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner — because I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
Is this a publicity stunt and a popularity contest, and mostly trvial? Yes, even though Kutcher did agree to donate $100,000 to the charity Malaria No More when he reached 1 million followers. And even though CNN may be more likely to keep more of its new followers from this challenge long-term.
However, there’s an interesting backstory: The CNNbrk account was only recently acquired by CNN. A Web developer named James Cox independently created CNNbrk in 2006 because he wanted to get news headlines by text message on his cell phone.
As noted in a new Nieman Labs article, How a CNN user propelled the network into Twitter’s top slot — or why CNN headlines are so short, in 2006, “…if you can remember that distant age, getting the latest headlines on your mobile device wasn’t yet trivially easy.”
The advent of Twitter, which allows users to receive tweets from certain accounts via SMS text messaging, made this technically easy. Cox set up the CNNbrk account, wrote a five-line script in the Ruby programming language to convert CNN’s popular e-mail headline service into tweets, and that was the genesis of this hugely popular service. (Note: CNN now offers its own breaking news text message service.)
On Apr. 16, Silicon Alley Insider reported:
“CNN confirms that it has has taken control of the @cnnbrk account — and its [at the time] 944,000 followers. CNN didn’t disclose any financial details, but said it’s been working with previous owner James Cox on the account for more than two years.
“This is no-brainer for CNN, and we hope they paid Cox a lot of money for the account he’s nurtured. By adding more stories to the feed — and links to CNN’s site — CNN.com could generate hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews per day. (CNN isn’t sure if it’s going to add links in the near-term.)”
Did Cox violate CNN’s copyright and trademark by launching the CNNbrk service without authorization? Quite probably. Does CNN stand to benefit amply from this effort? Also yes, quite probably. CNNbrk’s audience vastly dwarfs that of CNN’s official Twitter account, which as of last night had just over 67,000 followers.
CNN seems to consider Twitter important to its online strategy. Cox noted to Nieman Labs that CNN now edits its headlines to conform with Twitter (140 characters max). Also CNN was apparently willing to pay Cox for the CNNbrk account. Nieman Labs’ Zach Seward confirmed with CNN that “Cox had entered into a consulting agreement with [CNN] and that CNN now owned @CNNbrk.”
Which just goes to show that when fans of your news take initiative to amplify your brand, this should neither be automatically dismissed, feared or quashed. Figuring out a way to work with such independent efforts sooner rather than later might be more efficient and effective for everyone in the long run.
