It feels to me like "kill platform dreams" is written on the other side of the coin that says "sustainable business model".
It is a serious challenge that the data has some value, but that value is hard to extract usefully as a revenue stream. The emojitracker folks won't pay much, but offering it to them at a small rate vs a high rate to some other service has its own issues.
But since emojii tracker isn't real time, could they use a month old firehose? 6 months old? At some point the value of the firehose access falls off for "mainstream" users of that data, does it fall to a point where there is marginal value in giving free access to others on it? Even for small dollars?
Clearly as a public company Twitter has to do what it can to get good value for the assets it has created. That is a hard thing to do.
At the risk of sounding pedantic: Twitter's assets were created by its users, not the company. They alienate the users, there are no more assets and no more value to be had.
I think we see it a bit differently. When the grocery store chain sells information about the buying habits of its customers, it is the customers doing the buying, but it was the collection and monitoring systems that "created" the information.
Twitter has "users" but those users are not the "customers". Twitter created a watering hole so that it could interest nearby predators in access to where the herbivores would be on hot days.
To be counter-pedantic (is that a word?) If there were anywhere else for Emojitracker to get their data, then I would agree with you that Twitter did not create it.
It is a serious challenge that the data has some value, but that value is hard to extract usefully as a revenue stream. The emojitracker folks won't pay much, but offering it to them at a small rate vs a high rate to some other service has its own issues.
But since emojii tracker isn't real time, could they use a month old firehose? 6 months old? At some point the value of the firehose access falls off for "mainstream" users of that data, does it fall to a point where there is marginal value in giving free access to others on it? Even for small dollars?
Clearly as a public company Twitter has to do what it can to get good value for the assets it has created. That is a hard thing to do.