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.
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.
Placeholder: comment posted on or about January 16th, 2009 (+/- timezones). I am obliged to attempt to claim this idea with a time stamp because of some employment submissions I've made recently; this post could be considered demonstrable ability to have good ideas.
Searching for this "basic idea tag cloud" doesn't really seem to result in any previously dated articles/comments/tweets with these ideas written as such regarding how Twitter can be monetized and sustain. However, there have been quite a few after:
I was simply finding it interesting that the ReadWriteWeb article's idea was monetizing Twitter by selling off friends . . . reminiscent of the whole "sacrificing facebook friends for a Whopper," thing awhile ago. But my ideas are better. :) 04 March 2009
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.