

A Non-Sucky Twitter Business Model - jgilliam
http://3dna.us/a_non_sucky_twitter_business_model

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jarin
That seems awfully counterproductive, and it would take about 30 minutes for
someone to start republishing paid users' content.

Here are some ideas that I think would work way better:

\- In-stream advertising (ala Twitteriffic)

\- Charge a couple of bucks for mobile apps (or mobile app API access)

\- Charge for premium, business-oriented features (multi-user accounts,
autofollow, analytics, ability to receive DMs without following someone,
custom CSS on profile page)

\- Charge to vote on American Idol via Twitter

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bigiain
"it would take about 30 minutes for someone to start republishing paid users'
content."

That'd be something that Twitter should be able to keep on top of, at least
for naive automated retweets...

The more I think about it, the more I think it might work. Especially if they
can get micropayments worked out.

~~~
jarin
Well, if anyone had any doubts:

<https://twitter.com/#!/freenyt>

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flyosity
It's a good idea, but only if the account is posting information that's worth
the fee. Like the author says: MP3 downloads, exclusives, behind-the-scenes
stuff will be great for bands, but I think for non-celebrity accounts it might
be tougher to come up with valuable information. For retailers, coupons are
obviously the way to go, but I'm having trouble coming up with lots of other
good content examples.

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Skywing
You'd have to be prepared for Twitter to become the Apple App Store - there
would be 2 of everything. "FooAccount" and "FooAccount (FREE)", for example.
The free ones would just advertise content visible from their paid one.

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blhack
What about something like viglinks? Turn every bare outbound link from
twitter.com into an affiliated link, turn every link from t.co into an
affiliated link, etc.

Yes, people will be able to avoid this by using shorteners other than t.co, or
by using a third party client, but if what twitter is saying is correct (the
majority of users use the official client or use twitter.com), then this
shouldn't be a problem at all.

Are they already doing this? It seems incredibly obvious, it's totally
transparent to the users (I don't imagine that any of the users would be
against this), everybody wins.

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gersh
How about charging for longer tweets, or let you make your tweets have a
larger font for a fee.

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phlux
I really think this is a great idea - and would work well along with the
following:

I recently went through several rounds of interviewing at twitter (didnt get
it) - but had I got it, I was planning on submitting the following as a model
suggestion:

Twitter has proven itself as a very valuable communications/pr channel for a
vast number of celebrities, news sources and brands.

Twitter should provide a more broad content platform to the critical mass of
influential people, sources and brands by allowing for larger content to be
hosted on Twitter.com itself.

Effectively visualized as a slide-to-the-right "extended content" panel that
would allow celebrities, as an example, to have exclusive content and articles
hosted that are directly accessible from twitter, and the twitter client
etc...

You would continue to have your regular succinct content flow - but you can
drive traffic to deeper-dives on your expanded panel (It effectively allows
for full-length content to be hosted in-line.

This can be monetized by twitter in a rev sharing manner such as you suggest.

If you searched for something, you could be driven to the extended content
pages and then be shown the contextual stream of tweets that apply to that
content as well.

Twitter has two options; find a way to properly monetize the message format
they have, or modify their offering. There could be a good hybrid as well in
this approach.

