Stephen Colbert is not making money off of Twitter

I’ve gotten multiple messages today about a story that is circulating about Stephen Colbert making money off of Twitter. The story, reported by such mainstream news outlets as the New York Post, and by blogs such as MediaBistro, goes a little something like this: Stephen Colbert is on the Twitter ad service Ad.ly, and is being paid to promote products in his tweets. He is one of many “Publishers” who is paid to promote products within his Twitter feed.

There’s only one problem with this widely reported story – they’ve got the wrong Stephen.

Back in the summer of 2008, we wrote a story that basically said that, at the time, there was no official Twitter feed for Stephen Colbert. This was confirmed by our sources at Comedy Central. At the time, there were two major fake Stephens – @StephenColbert (currently at 382,677 followers) and @StephenTColbert (currently at 97,597 followers). The controversy about @stephentcolbert actually got so big that he “came out” as a fake in a blog post that said, in part:

While perusing twitter, (I do have a personal account, but it is highly unlikely that a living soul will ever come across it), I found that someone was posting under the name of “StephenColbert”, the host of my favourite television program. The account consisted of a number of quotes from the show and had not been updated in quite a few months. Finding my own life extremely boring, certainly not “twitterable”, I thought it would be humourous to create another Colbert account, this one updated with some regularity and more than just quotes, but I ended posting quotes anyway due to the lack of my personal creativity. I began to notice that while twittering back and forth with people some of them reacted as if I was the real-deal. I thought that if they enjoyed thinking that they were actually interacting with Colbert, why deny them that small pleasure, as I assumed the majority of people that followed the account knew it was all done in jest. I also had a lot of fun doing it.

The account eventually made the front page of Digg, and @stephentcolbert admitted to the fraud and went on. Or so it seemed.

Now @stephentcolbert is one of the Ad.ly “Publishers”, making money off of tweeting to people, most of who are under the assumption that Stephen Colbert is actually tweeting this information. A person is making money, possibly significant, from tweets made on this fake Stephen account.

Stephen Colbert (and Viacom lawyers) have always been very gentle on fan sites, even fan sites that claim to be Stephen himself. So I doubt that this person will be hounded by anyone legal to call them on their fraud. However, for those many people who have send e-mails and twitters of concern to the site, let me make this very clear.

1) Stephen Colbert’s official Twitter site is @stephenathome.
This is the only verified Twitter account affiliated with Stephen Colbert. Any other that you may stumble across is NOT Stephen Colbert.

2) Stephen Colbert is not affiliated with Ad.ly.
The person who Ad.ly is using to say that Stephen Colbert is one of their “publishers” is NOT Stephen Colbert. It is a fake account who has admitted to its fakeness and is now reaping financial benefits from duping Stephen Colbert fans.

This also means that Stephen is not making some money on the side through his tweets. The official Twitter account continues to simply be an Easter Egg for the hard core “C-Section” fans.