How I would make money with Twitter

Yet another dance of the seven veils for the Twitter Business model:

At a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams brushed off--again--criticisms that the company is slow to turn on its revenue-generating engines.

At first, it sounded like Williams was a bit lost on the revenue front. "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because...we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

I would do it another way, which is to replicate the Freemium model that chatrooms have used for a decade - a "Silver", "Gold" and "Platinum" levels that allow deeper visibility of other members' data, and more services (search etc).

I would also broker SMS services - I can't believe its not possible to do attractive bulk deals to allow people to take Twitter as an SMS service and Twitter takes a cut. That imho could be the really big number, in fact you may bundle deals and add services in that way as well.

In addition, I think they have a few other levers:

(i) Add payment plans if one has above a certain number of follows - say 1,000. At least the serious spammers would pay.

(ii) Follow the CyWorld, Habbo, Flirtomatic models and sell little things in bulk that people can give each other

(iii) Have a "give us some love" option so people can donate to Twitter at times of extreme delight.

(iv) Sell Ads on the user landing page - I don't think anyone would object to a Pagetop Ad where the Home etc are now, and on maintenance pages if they knew it was in a good cause (ie their free service). easy on the intrusive datamining, just general stuff for the demographics.

The trick is to not put any friction on the comms flow for the vast majority of users.

No doubt they have thought of these and more, but the point is that one can look to use cases where these do work and users are not p*ssed off by them.

Also, it is clear that making money is a bit more "piquant" than it was:

Williams said, "We're looking at Q1 for revenues." This is a change from the original, pre-economic meltdown plan. "The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That's no longer the case, since I don't want to raise money in 2009."

Here's a hint - Execution is 9/10ths of the law, to mix metaforce - or JFDI as it is known. The loyal audience has stayed with Twitter through multiple fail whale sightings, they realise the world has changed, in my view they will stay with them now.

PS Twitter, if this is of any value, feel free to contribute to our coffers in the best ShareWare tradition