

Twitter May Have Found Its Business Model - lnguyen
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_may_have_business_model.php

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indiejade
Hmm. I can think of several ways for Twitter to make money: use pull instead
of push. Harness the wisdom of the crowd to extract value from them.

Because what Twitter is, essentially, is a market researcher's goldmine. And
access to real-time opinion. Why drop ads on people, when you can extract from
them opinion that is probably more "valuable" than the small change from
advertising?

Right now, they ask one question: "What are you doing?" Why not ask other
questions? Rotate them, mix it up a little bit. They could even, for example,
have a "word of the day" (or something) and ask people to tweet about that: in
140 characters or less, of course. Anything from a brand name to something
like shoes. Re-package and sell that data to companies or competing companies.
"This is what people are saying about ________ (you, your competition) today."

But that's just one idea; there's a lot of room to play with it. There's
definitely a lot of untapped power/profit to be had in the collective.

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jcs
I agree. I remember seeing a site around the US Presidential Election time
that used the mass of tweets to form a consensus of opinion on a number of
topics.

Surely mining this collective intelligence provides invaluable market insight.

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jballanc
Really? Advertising? Can't anybody come up with a better business model than
advertising?

How about this: Charge for API keys. There's already a crap-load of Twitter
apps, and some of them are not free.

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josefresco
I agree advertising is boring, but it works and there's a ton of money to be
made with it. Even creative ideas like yours for the API would pale in
comparison and put the load on developers which isn't exactly super nice
unless they are profiting. Unfortunately (or fortunately for some) _consumer
spending_ continues to power our (US) economy. Therefore platforms to get
people to buy are worth a ton.

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jballanc
Yes, but not everybody in the world has to sell directly to consumers...

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brandonkm
The main problem I have with this potential business model, is the overt focus
on adding friends as a part of the revenue stream. I think the focus should
instead be on 'what we can do right now, with our userbase to make money?'.
There is a large pool of current users that would gladly pay if twitter had
attractive premium features. Maybe they should focus on extracting revenue out
of their existing user base first and then move on to a more dynamic business
model second?

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thwarted
Yeah, and then what happens when Burger King comes out with something that
challenges your revenue stream that is based on making connections by
encouraging you to break connections?

Alternatively, if the monetary value of the network is defined by the edges,
rather than the nodes, and everyone is connected to everyone else, how do you
determine the valuable connections from the meaningless ones? As the number of
connections goes up, their individual value would seem to go down. Beyond that
being basic economics, you're setting yourself up to be limited in the kinds
of additional things you can do as the meaning behind the individual
connections approaches zero.

If twitter added some metadata behind the ability to create connections, like
allowing users to group their connections into buckets (initially
preconfigured to encourage meaningful use) like "co-workers", "friends", etc
and let you filter what you publish and what you subscribe to in different
ways, it could work. But then they'd have created FriendFeed.

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iamdave
I don't like the idea of being given a basket of people and then cherry
picking who I'm going to follow and who I'm not. Because I only follow people
I either know personally, or are local to my area who I'll probably meet
anyway at hackathons.

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TomOfTTB
I don't have a problem with the concept necessarily but I don't think it would
work. If you think about this logically people on the web actually go to great
lengths to avoid ads. This idea relies on people willingly staying subscribed
to ad-based-twitter accounts. Doesn't seem likely to me.

The article suggests that advertisers will just "have to remain interesting"
but put in traditional terms that would be the equivalent of making a new
commercial each time you needed one (rather than just replaying the same one
like companies do now). I'm not sure many companies have that level of
creativity available to them.

~~~
jskopek
I don't think traditional advertising works in a twitter model. Remember, the
140 character limit doesn't look like it'll go away any time soon, so
companies will have to either broadcast their message in a concise string or
link to an external site; who in their right mind would actively browse to an
ad.

I can see coupons and viral ads doing well, as well as games and novelties
like the BK Whopper Sacrifice doing well, but you're right about those being
hard to pump out on a large scale

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vaksel
this is just stupid noone will pay for friends. I more or less have one of
those blank accounts, I just follow people, but I get a few requests here and
there by random people who want to follow me...and the account doesn't have
any information in the profile, nor a picture.

They should work on adding new features that businesses are looking for...and
then create a separate level of accounts for businesses and charge a monthly
fee for that.

~~~
jwesley
I agree no one will pay for friends. You can get them easily enough without
paying, just by interacting with people and searching for users that Twit
about relevant stuff.

As much as people here think advertising is boring, I think Twitter could
actually have a great contextual ad business. As long as the ads are relevant.
If someone Twitters about HD TVs, would they not be especially be engaged by
an ad for TV's? What about people who tweet about flights seeing ads from
airlines? There is a lot of potential there.

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ivankirigin
Would you pay for followers on Twitter? How much? Tipjoy could make this
happen pretty easily <http://tipjoy.com/twitter>

I've been debating doing it for <http://twitter.com/tipjoy>

$1/new follower? Too high? Lame?

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Danmatt
Companies might follow potential customers or opinion formers for a fee, but
how many do they need? 1,000? That's £1,000 - not exactly big money.

Getting individuals to hand over a buck for 'good' followings ruins the whole
point of twitter and I can't see people doing it.

Bring back display advertising.

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diN0bot
one cool consequence is that twitter-using consumers will be slightly more
empowered to give feedback to companies. it's only a matter of time before
social and environmental grassroots aims become just as important as boardroom
bottom lines.

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AndrewWarner
Do people really have a problem finding friends to follow? Doesn't sound right
to me.

