

Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot? - pb30

I run http://usetrackthis.com (track your packages by Twitter direct message/email/SMS) and am looking for feedback on monetizing or improving it.<p>Right now all the action occurs through Twitter direct messages, so I don't have many pageviews to take advantage of. I've thought a couple strategies:<p>1. Deliver ads through Twitter once per user/per package/per update
(how much SMS spam will users tolerate?, any ad services I could use?)<p>2. Develop a webpage to login and manage/view packages
(Use AdSense?, make it a premium feature?, do I become yet another package tracker?)<p>3. Make the whole service freemium (limited number of free packages?)<p>Appreciate any feedback/ideas, thanks.
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trickjarrett
Your stats are unfortunately pretty small when it comes to advertising
dollars.

The fact is that Twitter doesn't lend itself to monetizing on the messages
itself, and as that is how your bot operates that makes it quite difficult.

Twitter spam is pretty unwelcome in general, the "friending" (when users
follow each other) is treated as a pact not to create noise. I think given
time it will become more acceptable as Twitter ages and more services spring
up that people want to use and need funding to survive.

I don't think Freemium will work for you, this isn't a necessary service and
that's what is required for user conversion from Free to Premium.

The webpage login may work, but now you're just giving the user a specific
action which means any ads you show them have a very low chance of catching
their eye.

I think my suggestion is check out Magpie or something similar, and make one
"broadcast" tweet rather than a DM to each user. They have to be following you
to get your DMs so they have to get your tweets. That's my suggestion.

~~~
ivey
Or sell ads yourself the old fashioned way, and call them sponsors. Send 1
message a day, thanking them with a short message and a link.

------
goodkarma
Four ideas:

1\. Are you getting their e-mail addresses? You could send out some kind of
e-mail once a month with a summary of their packages and some ads and/or
affiliate offers.

2\. Since you are sending them direct messages, they must be following you.
Use Magpie or some other service to just post advertisment tweets (not direct
messages) to your public timeline. You get paid on a CPM basis.

3\. After every nth package, send them a DM asking for a donation if they
appreciated the service.

4\. License your app to be the official Twitter bot of any of the package
tracker services. So if someone tries to track a package on any of their sites
it gives them the option to add to your twitterbot. (This one would be the
hardest/most work, obviously.)

------
trevorturk
I just started using the service a couple of days ago, and I'm very impressed.
Awesome work.

I can understand your problem, though. Honestly, I'm not sure that I would pay
anything for it, but I'm not a business user or anything - I'm just using it
as a slight convenience.

So, for me at least, there's not much value. Maybe I'd pay a one-time fee for
some kind of convenience, or to stop ads. I payed $10 for the Instapaper
iPhone app, but mostly as a "thanks for the awesome service" kind of thing. I
could see doing something similar for this.

Having some kind of ads doesn't seem like a bad idea, and maybe they could be
coupons or something? I dunno - maybe something where you got an affiliate
deal? I'm not sure how much I would tolerate, but if it was good stuff, maybe
a couple a week.

I'm just a joe-average-user guy, though, so I'm not sure how valuable I would
be as a way to profit. If there's a way to get after business or heavy users,
that might be the trick.

If it's not very expensive to run, perhaps you could open-source it or simply
use it as a portfolio piece. I've done some open-source work that ended up
benefiting me when I was looking for work. At the very least, that should be
somewhat valuable.

Sorry I can't be much more help than that. I think it's a great little
utility, but maybe this is a "feature not a product" situation. Perhaps you
could try to sell it to Twitter directly...? License it to UPS for exclusive
use...?

~~~
pb30
Thanks, I knew it'd be a tough one to monetize, or else I would've done
something earlier. Perhaps some sort of donation nag screen on the website
would increase the donation rate. It definitely doesn't take a lot of
resources to run, but I just wanted to gather some feedback

------
utnick
maybe you could sell/license your feature to another package tracker that does
make money?

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rrhyne
You need more traffic. Who has a line on people getting shipped packages?
E-commerce sites.

You could develop a plugin for zencart or any of the other major shopping cart
systems that lets users plug their twitter name in to get updates. That should
bring you lots of traffic. Maybe you could sell that?

That's not real money though, so i'm wondering if each titter message could
have a link to more info on the package? This would go to your site, where you
can run ads.

Hope that's worth something.

------
pstinnett
You have a lot of followers / are following a lot of users, so you could look
into using Magpie (be-a-magpie.com) to do some ads. I think you would need to
post more often to twitter.com/trackthis to really start making money from it
though. It also raises the issue of advertising to your users / spamming them
by requiring them to follow trackthis. Just an idea.

~~~
pb30
Awhile ago I added a thanks/pls donate direct message nag when a first-time
user submits a package. The results have been pretty poor, and theres been one
complaint on the Uservoice.

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davidhelgason
"Search for the woman": You know which packages they're sending, where to, and
with what providers. Is there a way to help your users save money? And is
there a way to make money off that, for example by reselling the shipping
services via an affiliate deal like the previous poster suggested?

d.

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snowstorm
your best bet is to get more users, get momentum, and hopefully one of the
shipping companies notices you and partners with you.

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emmett
How many unique users per day do you have? The size of your service really
determines the correct course.

~~~
pb30
~20 new users daily, ~40 new packages daily, ~180 unique users with stuff
being tracked, ~150 updates sent out daily

~~~
staunch
Assuming you found a way to get ads out there and then got $1 eCPM for them
that's still just $50/yr or so. Probably better to use this project to promote
one that has a better chance of making money. IMHO.

------
ivey
Whatever you decide to do, I think direct message ads are a bad choice.

