Follow Drew Carey's Twitter for Cancer Donation

I don’t have any interest whatsoever in Twitter, but when I read in the latest issue of Bicycling Magazine that Drew Carey has pledged a $1,000,000 donation for the LiveStrong Foundation if he gets 1,000,000 twitter followers by December 31, I decided to jump on the bandwagon.

Here’s a link to a CNN article about the pledge

Here’s a link to Drew Carey’s Twitter page

At the time of this post, he apparently has 276,339 followers.

I went ahead and registered for a Twitter account so that I can pitch in on this one.

And now his follower count is 276,428. That’s an increase of 89 over 45 minutes. Figure that averages out to 100 new users/hour. With roughly 414 hours until the end of December 31, the odds of this thing happening aren’t looking very good. Or is my math really off? How many users does Twitter have, anyway? Is 1,000,000 a crazy-high number of followers for a minor celebrity?

Ashton Kutcher and CNN both have it. This is really a pity. What’s sad is that the mega celebs who have the influence necessary to send some followers Drew’s way aren’t doing squat to promote it.

No kidding. You would at least think the celebrities that don’t like Drew Carey would be promoting this if no other reason than to make him give away a million dollars.

Some celebrity who doesn’t like Drew Carey should really pledge to donate a million dollars, plus a dollar for each missing follower below a million he has on 12/31.

Then Drew could retaliate by pledging two million dollars, plus bonus dollars for everyone that stops twitterfollowing him, in order to force his rival to spend more money, plus more bonus dollars for every follower that resumes following on 1/1/2010.

If I were cynical, I would think Drew purposefully picked a number he wasn’t likely to achieve so he didn’t have to shell out the cool one million. I saw an interview after he decided to give a million instead of 25k for the twitter spot (supposedly even that was way above the highest bid for charity) and one of his sports teams one or something and he was in a good mood and without contacting his accountant or anything just decided to up it to a million because 25k seemed “so small.”

But that’s if I were cynical.

PS. Can I have 25k Drew? It’s small. You won’t miss it.

According to the CNN article, he’ll donate $1 for every follower he gets, so even if the drive falls short and he winds up with only 500,000 followers December 31, he’ll donate $500,000. Sure it’s a bit of a publicity stunt, but it’s for a great cause. This is a bandwagon worth jumping on.

If that’s the case, I see no reason not to subscribe as a follower or w/e.

The question is, is Drew Carrey actually enough of an asshole to stiff the cancer folks if this publicity stunt doesn’t play out?

Now that it’s prorated, I don’t think so. He’ll give whatever is raised, but in a scenario where he gets dramatically fewer followers than one million… he still gets the publicity but for much less money as well. If he gets one million followers… he gets the publicity plus an outlet with 1 million people so he can charge advertisers for use of his twitter or whatever.

You guys sure are cynical. USC coach Pete Carroll has 200,000+ Twitter followers and I don’t think he’s ever had any advertising-related content. Same goes for Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh.

Well, don’t lump QT3 with this wet blanket. Still, Drew is a celebrity of a different type than coaches.

23 hours later, it looks like he’s up to 278,908 followers. That’s an increase of 2,569 in the past 23 hours, which definitely isn’t even a fast enough growth rate to get his total to 500,000 by December 31.