
Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use - gibsonf1
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/879748/Twitter-begin-charging-brands-commercial-use/
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bullseye
I just don't see this being embraced by more than a handful of companies. Some
brands are still just trying to understand how to use this for marketing
purposes. Then you have the headache of policing the personal accounts that
promote brands of employers.

As much as I would like to see a unique web company succeed, this doesn't
exactly inspire confidence that they (Twitter) have a solid 2009 revenue plan.

~~~
maxwell
"We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them.
We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for
commercial accounts." - Biz Stone

Sounds like opting for a commercial account would bring additional features,
not just require businesses to pay for what's now free.

~~~
jazer
Exactly right, maxwell. Charging certain customers more, just because of who
they are, is not a great business strategy :)

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mlinsey
I think this fear is overblown. You already see educational institutions and
individuals paying different prices for box software compared to business
users. Large and medium-sized businesses also probably wouldn't cheat the fee
system. Again, look to boxed software: would a major company run pirated
copies of Office 2007? It would be pretty easy for them to, but it's not a
huge expense and if anyone found out than it would be extremely embarrassing.
(It would be much easier to find out about businesses cheating with twitter
just by having some superficial distinction like a badge or icon on the
twitter site for paid users)

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sdfx
According to a recent story on venture beat, twitter has brought in $1m in
revenues for Dell.[1]

So there thould be quite a margin, even when Dell's VP of communities says
_"If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move
elsewhere."_

[1]: [http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-
dell-1-mi...](http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-
dell-1-million-in-revenue/)

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balsamiq
It's about time! I wonder what kind of premium services they'll start
offering...perhaps some blend of analytics, Twittersheep, TweetRank and
MrTweet...or perhaps even my old idea of paying people to be marketed to:
<http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=217> (BTW, I have stopped doing that until
recipients start getting paid for it).

Anyways, I'm ready to pay, where should I input my CC data @ev? ;)

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jrockway
Twitter is cool because you make an account and start doing whatever you want.

How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"? Will I have
to pay for a commercial account if I start tweeting constantly about how much
I love Apple? What if I only use Twitter to advertise my free software
project?

Anyway, the article is low on details, and I just don't see this working out
too well.

~~~
lallysingh
They'll probably keep the free stuff free for anyone. But there's a lot of
space for them to provide extra services to paying corporate customers.

Remember that they've likely been marinating on this idea since they started
up. It's also _very_ easy to provide more service than 140 chars.

Like a hyperlink that's separate from the tweet. Or customized tweets to
different groups of followers. Or formatting.

~~~
redrobot5050
You mean like a blog? So should Twitter strive to just replicate WordPress or
Tumblr then?

~~~
lallysingh
For a microblog product, it's not a bad idea! A socially-networked microblog
can stand to add some milliblog, possibly deciblog-style functionality for a
price :-)

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arien
_'If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move
elsewhere.'_

This is kind of ironic. You are in internet as a company to make business, but
you don't want to use paid services yourself. How do you expect companies to
make money if people isn't willing to pay? What makes you think that they will
pay your service, if they don't want to pay for e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Obviously Dell would be a bad example here since they sell hardware, but I
think this could apply to a lot of internet companies/start ups.

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ieatpaste
The market segment for paying customers is small, largely due to little value
added. Even with their set of "enhanced search/stream" tools, companies will
only benefit if users are commenting on their products. That goes to say, if
companies are popular, they will hear that they are popular. Little known
companies will not hear valuable opinions on their products. Furthermore,
analytics will be skewed since the twitter community is a particular set of
people.

Also, a large question would be: Who gets to choose between personal and
commercial? If I have an personal account where I talk about work, is this a
commercial account? The "web evangelists", marketing, and branding "gurus" -
do these guys need commercial accounts? Does the size of the company matter?
C-Corp or Sole Proprietorship?

While I do want to see Twitter succeed, I feel like they have other, more
appropriate alternatives that could be feasible.

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Danmatt
This would have to be implemented in a very sophisticated way. For a start
Coke is a business, but then so is a start-up with three employees - are you
telling me they should pay the same?

It must be the case that Twitter will offer bells and whistles to big
companies and charge for them - otherwise entrepreneurs simply won't use it to
build their businesses.

Also you have to think about a company's revenue streams. A car manufacturer,
which could conceivably make a sale from a click-through, stands to benefit a
lot more than a publisher that gets money through ad revenue.

I can think of about a million other problems too.

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pj
This amounts to "good will" on the part of the potential customers to keep
Twitter alive. I doubt we'll see any ROI calculations.

Twitter is just a feature of an information system and that feature can be
implemented easily on a company by company basis and incorporated as an RSS
feed or whatever.

Any other use would only be considered advertising and that is difficult to
quantify and internet advertising isn't doing so well at the moment...

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twoz
Product/revenue ideas for Twitter for better or worse:

* Twitter Dating

* Twitter Auctions

* Twitter Q&A (crowdsourcing answers to your questions)

* Twitter Tube (links that actually open up YouTube videos on my iPhone which are thus easily discussed)

* Twitter Quick Pix (tweet out a quick picture from my iPhone, with photobucket/tinyurl integration)

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jacquesm
So, that opens the door to a free competitor that does not charge. The wheel
turns once more...

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gjm11
A free competitor that doesn't charge might get the business of lots of
businesses. So now you -- J Random User -- have: (1) Twitter, where all your
friends are, and (2) Fritter, where lots of online marketers are. Which are
you going to use? Hmmmmmm, difficult decision.

And then all the businesses on Fritter notice that no one is reading their
freets (frites?), and either give up or go back to Twitter and pay the twax.

Doesn't really sound like that promising a business plan, to me.

~~~
jacquesm
Do you think twitter has such a huge population now that another startup along
the same lines does not have a chance of succeeding ?

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apgwoz
There has to be a very compelling reason to switch. Laconi.ca/Identi.ca might
end up being somewhat successful, assuming it can survive it's growth. The win
there is that businesses can start their own federated Laconi.ca instance to
talk to other Laconi.cas out there.

But, there's still the problem of Twitter. There are so many Twitter based
apps out there, that spread their brand which means there's about 6 gazillion
sites other than blogs, and now news sources like CNN, that actually promote
the use of Twitter. Twitter is big.

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arockwell
Twitter has a lot of mindshare (I can't believe how much I see it mentioned on
TV or mainstream newspapers). However, in terms of user base they are still
pretty small (6 million?). There will be more competitors, especially since
making your app work with Twitter is relatively easy.

~~~
apgwoz
I think that the reason it's only 6 million is that everyone else is just
using facebook. I use twitter/identi.ca to have conversations, ask questions,
"microblog" but when my posts get pushed to facebook, my friends have no idea
what I'm doing.

In other words, maybe the best way for someone to take down twitter is to
create a compelling reason to not use facebook's status feature, and instead
use the next new thing.

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wallflower
Of course, Twitter is not going to find the perfect revenue model with
iteration one (and they may alienate potential customers) but at least they
are getting started. I wonder if @comcastcares will have to pay.

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vaksel
the whole twitter phenomenon is just a circle jerk of marketers and internet
"celebrities". I doubt if even 5% of their population is "real" people. And
even that 5% is nothing more but fanboys who wish to be the future internet
celebrities.

I don't know a single "real" person who uses it, beyond that first minute. All
of them come away with "WTF is the point".

Sure twitter has marketing power, because all the bloggers have convinced
themselves that this is the best thing since sliced bread. But the real world
could care less.

~~~
zacharypinter
Twitter can definitely be a waste of time. However, there's often some gems of
information in the midst of it all.

My twitter strategy as of late has been to catch up on tweets while sitting on
the toilet. The iPhone helps with this endeavor.

Also, search.twitter.com has become an essential source of information.

~~~
alone
> catch up on tweets while sitting on the toilet.

That is my email strategy, sometimes coding too.

