Finding a Revenue Model for Twitter

Wednesday, October 15. 2008

Finding a Revenue Model for Twitter

Read/Write Web asks that we find one:

Twitter is addictive and fun and even occasionally useful. If anybody can pull this business model off, it will be Twitter. It has scale, seem to be moving mainstream and they've even fixed their reliability issues.

But Twitter won't survive if it doesn't find a great revenue model. This matters to all of us.
Why This Matters To All Of Us

If Twitter fails to find a revenue model and hits the deadpool, it will have a chilling effect on innovation. That matters to all of us in the innovation economy. Sure, you could live without Twitter, but what about the funding chances for that brilliant idea of yours?

Here's some options - a combination of these would work:

(i) Add in higher value services that users can pay for - better visibility across the network, more than 1000 people following, SMS messages in Europe, that sort of thing

(ii) Sell small virtual trinkets that people can give each other, or decorate their sites with

(iii) Advertise - not on the messages, but on the home site. Can't be hard to be discreet.

(iv) Get users who don't like Advertising on their homepage to pay

However, endgame must be to find a large player who would get strategic benefit from owning Twitter (eg mobile traffic) - there has to be a sale of some sort, this is like email with pictures on - no one will pay for it standalone. Telcos, Telco wannabees and media co's with global aspirations come to mind.

Posted by Alan Patrick in Social Networks at 23:48 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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All are very good idea, but I believe they can do much better then that: they could add a third button to tweets (in addition to reply and star) that has a custom effect, depending on the content of certain messages. E.g. they could have ‘buy this album’ when someone mentions Madonna, ‘find tickets’ for a film or a play — etc.

Well, they could have a ‘Re-tweet’ button too, but that won't bring any new revenue..

#1 Bertil Hatt (Homepage) on 2008-10-16 01:02 (Reply)

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