

A business model for Twitter that doesn't involve ads - pegobry
http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-answers-can-make-twitter-gobs-of-money-2009-7

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potatolicious
This sounds very similar to Aardvark (www.vark.com), which already does much
of the same thing. In fact, it seems to have a pretty impressive question
classifier, and uses it to learn which topics you're good at to personalize
questions you receive to your interests.

You might need invites to try it out? I have a few, drop me a line if you want
one.

Aardvark can take several minutes to get you an answer though - but usually
answers are above 140 characters, which has its pluses :)

~~~
pegobry
Yes, I know it's similar to Aardvark and other services (particularly in
Asia), which I consider a plus: it means the concept's got a future. Just
because someone is doing it doesn't mean it can't be a great business for
Twitter -- quite the contrary. After all, Google was the _second_ company to
let people bid for CPC text ads next to search results...

~~~
potatolicious
It's an interesting concept - but I'm still apprehensive about it. I mean, you
are talking about two non-trivial things that are currently well outside
Twitter's competencies:

\- creation of (yet another) online currency and (yet another) micropayments
platform.

\- a "matchmaking" platform that's completely unlike the "following/follower"
system that Twitter has going right now.

The question at this point would be: why Twitter? Since the question doesn't
go out to your followers (rather, to the general public), and since the
response system is unlike Twitter feeds at all... what makes this a "Twitter"
idea? This completely fails to integrate with their present service offerings.
You won't be able to leverage much (if any) of their existing technology... I
don't see a compelling reason for this to be a Twitter thing to do, as opposed
to another startup (like, say, Vark?)

~~~
pegobry
Those are all good points but I think it can work for Twitter because it's the
only service that's: \- Real time; \- Accessible from anywhere; and \- With a
huge userbase already.

I realize it would be a huge engineering endeavor for them. That said, as I
mentioned in the article, if they don't go the "Twitter dollars" route they
can go through a third party like PayPal's new open API or Amazon, which would
make things easier.

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brianliu
I think people will be unwilling to pay at all, or the price will be driven so
low that it is negligible. I can only think of a handful pay-for-answers
services, and all of them have failed.

Furthermore, 140 characters is quite a restriction. By allowing only simple
questions, the payments will be respectively low. Getting 10% of $0.10
questions isn't a way to make money - even at high volumes. They could have
easily used their large user base for something that is much more profitable.

I don't believe Twitter has problems thinking of monetization methods. It's a
specific problem where they want to 1) not alienate their existing users, 2)
scale to their entire user base or large subset of their user base, 3) and
make enough money that it's worthwhile. The sheer scale of the number of users
makes it difficult to navigate, since any change will probably piss off large
groups of users (look at fb, and the recent @reply fiasco).

Personally, I don't feel like a premium answers system will fulfill 1) or 3).

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tybris
Twitter.com provides the entire Twitter infrastructure, but only a mildly
popular front-end application. They should focus on selling their
infrastructure (i.e. cloud computing). I'm sure there would be tons of people
interested in their real-time search pipeline.

------
DanielStraight
Interesting idea. What if someone gives a stupid answer though? Do you still
have to pay them?

~~~
pegobry
You choose the best answer based on the ones you get. Only the best answer
gets any money. If there aren't any good answers you don't pay anyone and you
get either a credit for another question or a refund after (say) 10 business
days.

~~~
karanbhangui
What stops you from never deciding on a good answer and just using the service
for free?

~~~
DanielStraight
My thoughts exactly. I think there would need to be some penalty for not
paying out.

Also, what if you WANT to pay out to multiple people? What if multiple answers
were best?

Also, if you know 100 people are going to answer, what is the sense in
answering if only the best answer gets any money? What are your chances?

~~~
pegobry
I've given my answer to the freeriding problem above: upfront payment,
moderation, rep systems...

Re: 100 people answering the same questions: I don't think that would be that
big a problem, because questions are going to be specific. Take my use case
scenario: at any given point on Twitter, there _might_ be 100 people willing
to answer questions about restaurants in Paris -- but about _sushi places_ in
a _specific neighborhood_? Much less likely.

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TheSOB88
You have to keep both the questioners and the answerers from gaming the
system. Questioners could say that none of them are good answers, and
answerers could just give crap answers. How do you solve this?

~~~
pegobry
For answerers: there's the monetary incentive.

For questioners: you pay the money upfront, when you post the question. Once
you have the answers, since you've already paid, psychologically speaking,
it's going to be more difficult to stiff the answerer, since you've already
accomplished the act of paying and you've already "mentally" parted with the
money.

Obviously plenty of people _will_ try to game the system, and it's based on
the premise that "people are basically good." That was the premise behind
eBay, and they still built a pretty good business out of it. Plenty of people
try to game the system, but still the vast majority of transactions go off
without a hitch, and it's a multibillion dollar business.

~~~
pegobry
Plus there would be a kind of moderating system, possibly crowdsourced. You
could complain if you gave a good answer and got stiffed. People who stiff too
many people could be banned from using the service (and possibly wouldn't get
their money back).

