Welcome to PromoRoll. This project was built by and owned by David Thrift (that’s me), artist, photographer, curator, and site owner at ddavidd.com to serve as a platform for personalized curated promotions. Continue reading below for more information.
Content Curation by: David Thrift
Why PromoRoll and what is this project for?
Specifically I wanted a project where I could promote content that I wouldn’t post along with my content on my website or primary Twitter channel @MrDThrift.
PromoRoll is a small project with a big mission that I manage on the side, along with all of my other online work. Being a small project is why it only has a Twitter page @promoroll, and this one page on my website. It is my “get away” from more serious work when I just want to have some fun on Twitter, and promote some interesting content that I wouldn’t promote elsewhere.
I wanted a project where I can promote other people’s work, or videos, but not have the promotions overkill my own content output where these promotions wouldn’t fit with other areas of my work. I thought that’s what my MUDWALKER NEWSLETTER would be for, but it turns out, promos never really made it there.
I think promos probably deserve a publication specifically for that, and that has always been in the back of my mind when it comes to promoting some select content. That is where PromoRoll comes into play. Eventually (maybe) I will publish a small ebook with promo listings that go out on the PromoRoll Twitter page exclusively. It must be noted that some of those promotions do come from my newsletter. So my newsletter does influence content shared on PromoRoll although they are two different projects. For now however, PromoRoll works entirely on Twitter as a sort of online magazine, and I’m glad that I built the platform as simple as it is to operate there.
What type of content is promoted at PromoRoll?
PromoRoll is a sort of “anything goes” personal advertising venture. What that means is that content promoted on PromoRoll is curated personally by me. Some of the types of content promoted is art, books & ebooks, crafts, crochet, Etsy shops, fishing, knitting, and music. I’m also open to expanding content promoted in other areas of interest. Of course I also promote my own content such as my ebooks, or lists on my website. I mean why not do that? I do run this project for promoting things after all, so promoting my work with PromoRoll is certainly allowed… you know, since I own PromoRoll.
There is also adult content intended for a all male audience of straight and gay men. That is a primary differentiator from what I would promote on my main Twitter channel or here on my website in mass broadcasting. Some of the adult content is just plain smut for fun, and some other content is the promotion of some select favorite OnlyFan’s and Chaturbate broadcasters, and photographer’s work that I like. I believe there is a place for adult content, but it shouldn’t be in all places. That’s why I only share this content on the PromoRoll timeline. That doesn’t mean I don’t have adult content associated with my main Twitter account as I do follow such content on that account, and I have a few collections built on the twitter platform. If you look around my website, you can find those collections in the blog.
PromoRoll is a mixed bag of things. You never know what you might see in the tweets there. With PromoRoll, I am able to more freely follow accounts on Twitter than I am on my main Twitter, which allows me to discover new content more frequently than I would anywhere else. With PromoRoll, I’m always adding new content sources to my promotion listings, and therefore always trying to offer new things to see.
What is on the menu for promotions currently, and how often can viewers expect to see recycled content?
PromoRoll is very much in it’s infancy currently, so I haven’t had a chance to build much in terms of content promotion, however I am working on it as quickly as possible.
Recycled content is important for attracting new viewers, for reminding viewers, and also for viewers who may have missed something posted previously that they might like to check out. Some content will be posted daily, and other content will be posted on a weekly basis, and at specific times in order to maintain fluent scheduling and organization of content publishing.
Scheduled content currently includes:
Instagram follow recommendations – Instagram is my second favorite social networking platform after Twitter. I have a huge list of accounts on IG that I can recommend, and I’m working on making recommendations for all of my favorite ones. I also plan to publish a list of all the accounts here on my website (eventually).
Unscheduled content includes:
Frequent retweets (usually photos), sometimes announcements about updates to this page, and random blurbs I tweet out.
What are the rules and operating procedures of PromoRoll on Twitter?
Great question! I want PromoRoll to be a place known for sharing useful and interesting content for gay, straight, and bi men. So to try and eliminate as much distraction as possible, I’ve had to adopt rules and regulations in the way I run the PromoRoll Twitter page. The main reason being is that because of the type of audience I follow primarily (the gay community), politics are dragged into my home timeline, and I really don’t want to get involved too much in the politics while trying to maintain PromoRoll.
I have resorted to using Twitters muted words feature to mute specific words relating to politics and other topics as needed to keep my home timeline clean. I also utilize Twitter’s privacy settings to eliminate wasting time on notifications from people who generally don’t offer much value in conversations elsewhere off of my content feed (e.g. replies to my commentaries on news events).
The following list provides more detail about how I run the PromoRoll Twitter page:
- PromoRoll does not do “follow for follow”. If I follow your page, it was out of genuine interest, and I only follow accounts that I think will benefit the PromoRoll project’s mission of promoting select content.
- The following words are in my muted words list to avoid wasting time scrolling through distracting tweets on my home timeline: affadavit, biden, democrats, ppp, republicans, trans, trump. I list these words in case someone else may want to use them in their muted words lists to avoid political tweets in their Twitter home timeline.
- My preferred muted notifications settings allow me to get notifications from people I follow. I do not get notifications from people who do not follow me, who have a new account, who has a default profile photo (in other words hasn’t uploaded a photo), and who hasn’t confirmed their email or phone number. I can still tell if someone replies to me by looking in my Tweets & Replies tab on Twitter, but that requires making an effort to do that. Sometimes I don’t care to make that effort, and I don’t.
- PromoRoll is all about sharing. That includes retweets as well as curated content. Some content NSFW. Some not. This is a very active sharing venture. PromoRoll will most likely always follow more than are following. I am consistently following more and more accounts to see what is out there in the Twitterverse. I am not concerned about having more followers that I am following in this project. I block fake profiles, and seemingly spam accounts if I can catch them that try to follow which also contributes to why PromoRoll has or keeps a low following. I don’t want fake accounts making PromoRoll look like it’s bigger than it might not actually be at any given time.
- As mentioned, PromoRoll does share NSFW content, primarily by retweeting. The NSFW content shared isn’t intended to build the overall value of what PromoRoll does regarding content promotion. There are a lot of people promoting their OnlyFans pages on Twitter, and I’ve discovered that a lot of these people are on a Twitter page that they just made this month (whatever month it is currently), and have 17K followers, but aren’t following anyone, and only have 4 photos posted to their Twitter page. Something about that doesn’t add up. Maybe they’re recycling photos and deleting tweets to keep momentum going on those pages without sharing a lot of content. Who knows? I don’t, and I don’t care. When I see those pages, I might gawk at the photos. I may even save a few for personal enjoyment to view later, but I generally don’t follow those pages, nor do I share their content.
Do you make any income with PromoRoll?
No. PromoRoll was not specifically created to become a source for earning money. That’s not to say that in the future, growth of the project wouldn’t lead to it becoming an income source, and I do promote my ebooks and ebook store at PromoRoll. So who’s to say that I won’t earn some income through that by using PromoRoll for that purpose.
PromoRoll is currently a personal project I maintain for my own benefit (that benefit being a safehaven for more open sharing), and for fun, and that I hope helps others find some interesting things to discover, and that I can use as a tool for my own new content discoveries. I already have my ebook store online for earning income, as already mentioned above.
What is the history of PromoRoll?
PromoRoll came into existence on Wednesday, August 24th, 2022 at 9:44 PM CST when it’s name came to mind for the project. That evening I decided that I needed a new place online, specifically on Twitter where I could just be more free to share more content that wouldn’t interfere with other projects. Before I decided that PromoRoll would be the brand name for this promotions project, it was going to be called by several other names: Let’s Go Get It Promotions, Gotta Promo, Gotta Promo Classifieds, Promo Letter, PromoPaper USA, or PromoSpeak.
None of the previous names I thought of really stuck with me, and I couldn’t find an available Twitter handle that I liked that would suit them. Then PromoRoll came to mind, and I found that the @PromoRoll handle was available, so I took that, and ran with it. My PromoRoll project has been running since 11:00 PM CST that night when I created the Twitter account for it.
As with original plans, I’m not really (but maybe) considering to put PromoRoll on it’s own domain. If the .com for the PromoRoll name had been available at the time I created this project, I may have purchased it, however it wasn’t available, and as far as I know there is no website there (at promoroll.com), and I don’t know it’s status other than according to icann, it expires on 2023-03-23 15:50:34 UTC. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for it’s expiration to see if I might be able to purchase it, and make an official landing page for the project off of this website where it currently resides under my PromoRoll project branding. Or, I could just make up some other domain for it. Otherwise PromoRoll will just simply continue to operate on it’s Twitter page, and this page on my website.
What is up with the PromoRoll logo, and how did a guy laying on a surfboard end up as the image representing this project?
I’m not a surfer, and I’ve never been surfing, or even skiing which is popular around my local area. In fact, I’m scared to death of deep water. So you can imagine I don’t swim often. I have always on some level though, had some admiration for surfers and what they do in their water-sport.
I once purchased a surfer’s language dictionary that was full of words and phrases surfers use, but I never read much into it. I only bought the dictionary as a novelty as I love dictionaries, encyclopedias and other similar publications, but no longer own it. I think I threw it away. I wish I hadn’t now. Maybe I’ll find another copy to buy sometime. Imagine me, a guy from Alabama, with no real history of being around the ocean much, thinking it would be cool to learn the surfer’s lingo, when it would probably be more beneficial to learn a real language. I also love beaches, and the oceans.
With these things said, I was definitely not looking to make a logo for this project that would feature a surfer, nor did I intend to create a surfer theme for this project with it’s imagery, but I love what I created out of the process for this small project with just one stock-photo.
As said, PromoRoll is a small side project for me, so it really only needs one photo to build awareness for it I think. I also think that regardless of what theme in the logo and overall imagery of the project that I was looking for, I ended up with an exciting image and logo for this project.
On the night that I started putting PromoRoll together, I went to Unsplash in search of an image that I could use to create my logo for this project. The image you see in the logo and elsewhere associated with PromoRoll, was one of the first photos I saw when I went looking for stock photography to set up this project with. I was actually looking for something I could create a simple basic logo design with, but then I saw the “man on a surfboard” photo and it grabbed my attention. I thought there was a lot of energy in the photo, and that the guy on the surfboard had great strength in his physique, and dare I say a nice ass (there I said it). I wasn’t looking for a photo of a sexy dude for this project, but I don’t think anyone can deny that there is a lot of sexiness in the photo, and I hope the strength that can be seen in the image can project strength to this project. So as simple as it is, it just happened. I saw the photo. I liked the photo. I decided to use the photo for this project, and with the one photo I created the PromoRoll logo and some wild brightly colored images for my Twitter page header and for my website.
If I had to place any association between the surfer image in the PromoRoll logo, and the mission of PromoRoll, it would be that surfers as far as I know don’t stop doing what they love to do, and that is to go out and surf wave after wave. PromoRoll isn’t my first venture into promoting content. I’ve been at it since 2013 or longer. I have a long history of creating and maintaining directories and lists of resources online, and promoting content is just one of those things I love to do, and I don’t plan to stop.
Photo credit: This photo, by: Joseph Duarte.
Are there any other projects you run that viewers should check out?
Yes of course!
I would like to invite everyone to just go visit the home page here on my website. There on the main page, I try to keep information updated about all of my main content pertaining to my art, photography, and the ebooks I’ve self published.
More updates about PromoRoll and it’s operation are coming. Stay tuned.
