Ever since Twitter CEO Evan Williams stated Twitter has plans to have monetization in place by Q1 of 2009, there’s been a lot of discussion about various methods that Twitter can use to monetize their popular micro-blogging service. Most Twitter enthusiasts have speculated some sort of Twitter-Ads platform such as Facebook and MySpace have implemented but from my perspective, Twitter users tend to be more savvy than MySpace and Facebook users and such an implementation may damage Twitter’s reputation more than help monetize the site.
Considering the fact that Twitter began it’s lifecycle free of advertisment, the core community of early adopters will probably not react well to monetization efforts involving cluttering the site with spammy advertisments. One thing that currently separates Twitter from other social sites like MySpace and Facebook is that Twitter’s content is not wrapped in advertisments for ringtones, diet plans and other affiliate marketing scourge. Twitter is known for it’s clean, uncluttered interface. Despite the fact Twitter’s servers have been slow, unpredictable and experienced a great deal of downtime, the site is still generally fast loading when there are no hardware related problems.
So how could Twitter monetize their site without creating an uproar from the existing community?
ITProMarketer wrote an interesting article on monetizing twitter with several viable suggestions…
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Charging for corporate presences, but keeping personal presences free There is a lot of speculation that this may be the method that Twitter incorporates into its business model. With this method, people who wish to use Twitter as a front for their brand names or companies would have to pay a fee. This is logical because the business accounts are the ones that would have the money to pay for this service. However, I am not sure if this would work or even be accepted by the social media community. Here’s why: One facet of social media is that it is bridging the gap between personal usage and business usage. They are becoming one, and in effect, increasing trust and credibility for audiences of those who utilize social media. This model seems to be in opposition to that idea. |
Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines a possible solution involving selling friends on Twitter.
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Who says you can’t buy friends? $1 per user who takes the suggestion and opts in to getting messages from @JetBlue or @Zappos? That could happen. Could those companies keep their freshly purchased friends? Only if their Twitter output stayed interesting! |
Both of those suggestions have a lot of holes in them and both involve corporate or big business interest in Twitter. While many corporate entities have experimentd with Twitter, most have figured out that it lacks significant potential for corporate infomercials disguised as tweets. Stan Schroeder pointed this out in his article Twitter May Have Made Dell a Million, it Doesn’t Mean it Can Be (Easily) Monetized.
My opinin is that Twitter will have to be monetized very carefully with unique implementation that don’t seperate their communication service into corporate and personal. Here are a few of my ideas on how Twitter could monetize their site without creating a backlash :
Multiple Twitter ID Packs - Allows a user or organization from a specific IP to register multiple accounts on the service. I have two Twitter accounts but I know a few web 2.0 social media spelunkers who create hundreds of accounts on new media services such as Twitter, in hopes of one day re-selling those established accounts. If Twitter were to provide and interface for people to easily switch between and manage multiple accounts, such as Entrecard has, they could concievably sell 5, 10 or 100 username packs to interested marketers.
Twitter Username Sales/Auctions - Taking a percentage of auctions for Twitter user names and/or accounts. Allow selling of identities only through the Twitter auction site. Offsite sales are subject to banning. Creates a new secondry community for Twitter in addition to providing revenue. Hey, people used to sell low E-Gold numbers for thousands of dollars, anything is possible, and if it’s free to signup service you can bet there are people out there acquiring sought after usernames.
Twitter Profile Upgrades - Let’s face it, people like to customize their profiles on social media services and one of the most obvious methods for Twitter to monetize their members is to allow enhancements to user profiles for a fee. I’m sure there are thousands of marketers on Twitter who would gladly pay for an enhanced profile. This method propagates itself when somebody sees a member with an enhanced profile and wants one for themselves.
Revenue Sharing - One way that Twitter could possibly slip in some traditional advertising such as Google Adsense is to create a revenue sharing systems such as many popular forums have. Ads could be turned on or off depending on the users participation in the program.
One tragic aspect of Twitter is that the site is not search engine optimizable and the vast majority of Twitter’s traffic is “type in” traffic or “word of mouth” traffic. In contrast, MySpace has both social traffic as well as search engine traffic. The downfall for Twitter is that they are intrinsic to the community they created and causing early adopters to change the way they view the service could have negative consequences.
Despite all the hype and hoopla surrounding Twitter, I personally have not found it very useful for anything other than killing time. I’m sure there are many people who would extoll the virtues of the platform but I really can’t see the advantages Twitter has over chat rooms, newsgroups, forums, blogs or even other more organized sites such as Digg and Reddit. Is Twitter is an immediate avalanche of micro information in a text format or is it an over glorified guestbook. Given you remember the “sign my guestbook” scripts on every webpage a decade ago (BG) before Google.
If Twitter can tap into their community and work accordingly to offer value added services to existing members, I think they could monetize Twitter without selling out.
I like Twitter but if they plaster it with ads like Myspace I don’t think it will have the same effect on me.
Is it Possible to Monetize Twitter Without Selling Out?…
There’s been a lot of discussion about various methods that Twitter can use to monetize their popular micro-blogging service….
Twitter has millions of users (at least millions of usernames) and they should be able to figure out some way to make money from the site without having people lose interest.
How cool is that?
You make a company and the whole world seems to want you to make it big! People coming up with concepts to make money from the site.
I think that contextual “in tweet” ads will be the way they (eventually) go.
They can look at what you tweet, and what the people who you follow / follow you, and build up a pretty good profile of the stuff you’re interested in.
They’ll then post throw in an ad every 50/ 100 tweets, matching your interests.
This is really the only way they can show ads to you, because there are so many ways to consume twitter feeds, so showing ads on the site itself will be virtually worthless.
It’s about time twitter tried to monetize the system. Didn’t we all know it was coming? I am certain they will get the right model that won’t affect their readership. With the success they have achieved they surely won’t blow it up by coming up with a model that will irritate or annoy the members.
Whatever they do I’d rather they monetize it and stay alive than not and disappear. They’re still a business with costs to cover. We all seem to want everything for free without being bothered by adverts or any suggestion of money changing hands but businesses like Twitter still need money to keep going and we should support the services we enjoy.
I have never gotten into the twitter crazy, but honestly $1 or to pay for it, I think they will fail if they do that.
@Fred & Suzanne - you’re right, I’d rather they monetize than die, but they need to be very careful how they do it.
It’s got to be ads, the second they charge to use it, even $1 a month, they would lose, I would think, over 90% of their users overnight.
I think the IDEAs given by you, should be considered (and if possible,implemented) by twitter. I think you have thought a lot before writing this article.(Evenif you feel Twitting it is waste of time:P.)
Good ideas. I am using Twitter on many months now. The idea to have Twitter profile upgrades would be of interest to me.
I must be behind the times. I just signed up my Twitter account after reading this blog post. Now all I have to do is figure out how to use it properly.
Does anybody know of any good Twitter tuturials ?
Twitter is great, but just like what others said. If they put ads on twitter, it will not be great at all… :(
You really put your thinking cap on for this post. I wouldn’t have even imagined those possible soultions to monetize Twitter.
In order to monetize Twitter in an efficient manner without just selling the lot to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or other big players, I think advertising is needed.
Your proposals are original, but face it, they won’t bring much revenue compared to a few blocks of advertisements here and there.
For example, if the price of an upgrade is high enough to make a difference, no-one will use it. If costs just a one-off payment of a buck or two, it won’t bring in much cash.
I think it depends on how they monetize twitter. I am not a big fan of facebook and myspace and I heard facebook advertising is least effective… A free squidoo lens is more productive.
There are so many ways to make money online that it is almost unreal. People can sell anything, from diggs on digg.com or paying to get stumbled. This post is an excellent example. Keep it up
[…] few weeks ago I wrote about Monetizing Twitter without causing an uproar with the existing members. It appears there has been word from Twitter […]
I think twitter should stay amateur. When money enters the business, it loses virginity.
Twitter will start making money soon, they will find a way eventualy.
You know, I’m still very surprised that Twitter still have rolled out some kind of monetization scheme. Such a thing wouldn’t have to be to in your face either.
Twitter, for me, is one of those things I’m indifferent about. It’s there - so I use it - but wouldn’t be a huge burden if it was to dissapear. Hence, I think the $1 subscription method (as already suggested), would loose a fair chunk of the userbase.
CPC advertising it the most likey outcome. They could partner up with Google for some nice blended adsense content, and I think it would do very well.
But certainly with their now huge presence, every day that the site goes unmonetized, it seems they are nearly throwing away money.
Anyway - how is twitter monetized? Presumably by grants/donations?