With as few as 53 followers on Twitter, you could have the makings of an advertising platform. At least that's the idea behind TwitAd, a new service that lets Twitter users sell ads on their homepage.

TwitAd, which is not affiliated with Twitter, lets users name a price for their Twitter page and then matches them with advertisers willing to pay for a banner that presumably will be seen by the user's followers.

While Twitter has attracted a lot of attention of late, the micro blogging platform has been saddled with a nagging question about monetization. But it's not clear that TwitAd has answered that question, according to Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, who observes that few people actually go to the pages of those that they follow on Twitter. Rather, the purpose of Twitter is to push information out to users, rather than having them land on the pages of those that they choose to follow.

Meanwhile, Twitter itself has gained some notoriety as a platform for promoting AMC's acclaimed "Mad Men" television show. In the past week, several accounts imitating the show's characters were initially suspended and then reactivated. According to a report in The New York Times, Deep Focus, an agency that works with the cable channel, may be behind at least some of the fictitious accounts. Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus, didn't take credit for a "Mad Men" campaign on Twitter, but in a recent interview with iMedia, he did make the case for raising the bar when it comes to creativity online.