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Robert Scoble
Nine ways Twitter could make money:
January 6
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Mike Coulter, Bertrand Doux, Bart Muskala - AdNerd Sr. and 91 other people liked this
1. Look for affiliate revenues
- Robert Scoble
2. Exploit the spaces between content
- Robert Scoble
3. Adopt a freemium model
- Robert Scoble
4. Add Virtual Goods
- Robert Scoble
5. Get recurring revenue, er, find a way to charge for subscriptions.
- Robert Scoble
6. If you’re going to do advertising, get into creating ads that are viral and interactive.
- Robert Scoble
7. Create “frequent tweeting” programs
- Robert Scoble
8. Look for support, or tips, from your users.
- Robert Scoble
9. Get outside your website. Try to sell schwag. Do events. Etc.
- Robert Scoble
Pro features at some point would be nice. An enterprise version could work as well.
- Mike Fruchter
Inserting geo-targetted ads on Tweets.
- Mike Fruchter
Got any others?
- Robert Scoble
what about truncated, collapsable/expandable threading?
- Mark
And maybe "Nine ways Friendfeed could make money" hehe
- Mark
Twitter should license their technology to companies for intranets.
- Michael Gaines
TweetSense. Ad Tweets served BY Twitter, who has the best idea of your Tweet volume and subject matter. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/tweetse... Lowest hanging fruit, contextual ads on the Twitter Search page.
- AJ Kohn
What about platform support via dev tools? Encourage the ecosystem and make money at the same time? (Apologies, Robert, I replied on Twitter first.)
- Tim Beyers
premium blogger services. Cool site integration tools with metrics.
- Chris Baskind
10. add premium support for app developers.
- Darren Stuart
Considering they have had 100% uptime for a few months, you have to think stability is fine now and they have their engineers beavering away on new features. Of course digg has 80 engineers and hardly ever seems to launch anything :p
- Mark
Thanks for this article Robert
- bcultral
11. sell inhouse or managed solutions to companies for their own uses internally and sell federation CAL's so they can connect the internal solution to the wider twitter network so that specific users can tweet to the public.
- alphaxion
Sell the entire background page to brands by the hour/day with some of the area being made available for discounts/offers. (You need something to benefit users too, not just Twitter.) ;-p
- mtlb
I'm a little scared of the day all these FREE Social Networking sites CLOSE THE DOOR ON FREE, with all my data inside.
- PaulFrankRizzo
good point..what is the answer Robert?
- bcultral
Paul: I don't think free is going away. But I sure would pay for decent DM features, for instance. Lots of companies would pay for custom skinning features.
- Robert Scoble
By following a brand's advertising account you consent to receiving ads from them. Add some profiling info to this and it could be a powerful tool to receive adverts on a users terms.
- John Galpin
7.1> Post ad-tweets every half an hour from twitter account, which every twitter user will follow by default (have to follow by default). Make changes to API, so that people can't work around it and dodge this tweet.
- | Balu |
freemium is definitely the way, one flavor or another. you don't want to kill the value of the network - quantity and quality - by driving away elements of it. plus for every paying site, there will always be a new free site up in less time it takes to say "bob's my uncle"
- Pascal Bouvier
Create daily reports for similar types of tweets and licence that data to various companies, this will be user generated marketing report.
- Shanthala Balagopal
Chris: in that case I hope they do all nine! Just kidding, but, seriously, these sites need to find a way to make some revenues or they'll go away. If you don't want them to find a revenue model you are NOT a good user of these systems.
- Robert Scoble
ugh, can we please look at ways for twitter to make money without resorting to adverts? I'm pretty sure there's loads of ways, I've mentioned the one I have been bleeting on about for months now. How about you? Can you come up with ways to make money without going cap in hand to advertisers?
- alphaxion
Phase 1: Twitter Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Profit!
- Alastair Montgomery
alphaxion: most of these are not about advertising.
- Robert Scoble
Every local government needs to be on twitter, on their own twitter - and so does every state and federal government, police and emergency service - operated privately and 'independently' from the main twitter stream.
- Chris Loft
care to comment about Obama and his 8 million strong email database taken into the Govt side? I am a community organizer and feel that email list belongs to the people
- bcultral
Create a premium 'breaking news' service from data mining existing content and sell it to the old media.
- Andrew Leyden
apart from 6 ;) Tho I'm addressing the others who are commenting rather than your suggestions. Trying to tease a bit of creative thinking out of people. I think it is a very healthy activity to get people working on ideas for how to make money and excluding the advertisers at the same time.
- alphaxion
Chris: friendfeed has the same business model choices ahead of them to make too.
- Robert Scoble
Selling my email address is NOT a way to make money. People will lose faith and/or start using phony emails for signups.
- Michael Gaines
Alphaxion: #6 is actually about Context Optional, a company that creates very creative, viral ads. If you're going to do ads, that's the way to do it.
- Robert Scoble
squeeze the advertisers...users should not have to pay for service ..other then paying to put up with advertisers and regulating and demanding subtlety
- bcultral
Chris: hah! Actually most of the dating services are going to free models so they'll need to use some of these 9 too.
- Robert Scoble
Robin: problem is that advertisers are going away. TechCrunch is hearing that this year could see some sites have 50% fewer ad revenues than before. So, you'll see more sites use these nine business models on you.
- Robert Scoble
point taken
- bcultral
How many users on FF at this point?
- bravestface
Have Twitter subscribers pick a few products to "endorse", and have ads with their Twitter names attached to them. Then, give those users a discount based on # of clicks.
- Michael Gaines
Robert: not forgetting that comps can simply sing up with an account and tweet updates from there, which is where inhouse and federation can be handy. New version release? An auto tweet to the public can be done
- alphaxion
Chris: adsense is shit. Pays low CPMs. HotorNot makes $10 by selling virtual flowers. I'd love to be able to put a flower on your comments. Or something else. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Turn "following" into a Multi-Level Marketing pyramid!
- Rick Tuttle
very interesting discussion, robert. thank you! after 2 months of running Magpie (http://be-a-magpie.com), I can resume that #2 from your list works really well for both tweeps (they earn) and advertisers.
- Jan Schulz-Hofen
the sale of commercial API keys so that software such as starteam or sourceforge could tweet out info automatically based on trigger events to both private and public twitter networks.
- alphaxion
:)
- bcultral
Charge for Groups feature ala Yammer
- Sajida Khan
They should Plax-ify Twitter and create a premium service to share and update full contact details between followers.
- matt howard
Rick: I thought following already was a multi-level marketing pyramid! You should have seen my son on Sunday when we were on Leo Laporte's show. He told his 2,000 live listeners that they had to follow my son. He got 100 new followers in a couple of minutes.
- Robert Scoble
I think you forgot data mining (which links directly into advertising model, and buzz campaign monitoring). In a nutshell they should have a look at us ;-) (heck, we already do #2 and what I mentionned above!)
- twitscoop
bravestface: there are about 250,000 registered users of friendfeed (it's a guess based on available data).
- Robert Scoble
cant we think SMS as a strong income model?
- Sinan Ata
If you're a company trying sell/advertise via Twitter...I would expect them to pay. That way it doesn't piss off your standard user. The key is charging less than other competing PR firms.
- CannonGod
How about a search engine. Soon there will be so many people and companies on Twitter (and similar sites) that people will want to search for those like they do for web sites. It's already frustrating trying to find people now as the current search is very limited. Add to that a similar model to AdWords that could generate money. Would be interested to see what other people think of this idea!
- Joanna Butler
A variant on #5 - develop tools for professional/advanced use of twitter and charge for that level of service. Search / stats / archival tools.
- Patrick Pushor
Joanna: http://search.twitter.com has tons of places to monetize. I'd pay $5 a month to be listed on top or have a "pro" icon next to my name, for instance.
- Robert Scoble
Chris: there are quite a few that I don't even track. Hi-5, for instance.
- Robert Scoble
Emphasis on 'could'
- AJ Kohn
Robert: I'm with you on that! Once companies are using Twitter, they'd easily see the benefits of a pro listing. I have several clients who'd at least be willing to experiment that.
- Joanna Butler
The key is for Twitter to charge advertisers and not users. For example, they could make a mint by placing sidebar ads (a la FB) and justifying $ rates relative to the most popular people followed - such as you, @LeoLaporte, @guykawasaki, oh, and 'That One.'
- Jim Mitchem
@jim they would make orders of magnitudes more by selling their software, support of the software and access to their software instead of limiting themselves so badly with conventional advertising.
- alphaxion
If you tell Toyota or Coke that their constituency is online with Twitter and they're following specific people, or trending topics - you know they'd pay through the nose for those precious few seconds. It's push vs. pull.
- Jim Mitchem
@chris - that's cool, just don't snort coke and drive Trish in a Toyota concurrently.
- Jim Mitchem
@chris their software is a product they can sell, the userbase is a compelling feature of that product.. "pay for our commerical API to add twitter support to your product and add the ability of your customers to share their going-ons with the network and stoke demand and interest"...
- alphaxion
Chris: exactly. Done right, who wouldn't pay?
- Joanna Butler
What's the source of the current online culture of entitlement? Users don't want paid subscriptions nor to suffer ads. The same view that powers online piracy. Shouldn't creative professionals and those who fund them be compensated? If not, there will eventually be a big drop in production. Ps- few companies even use internal IM or digital BBS to share institutional knowledge, I don't see enterprise Twitted as being very lucrative.
- Colin Hessel
I pay for reliability and accountability - a free service owes me nothing, they can lose my data overnight, be unavailable whenever, disappear. A service I pay for comes with an SLA, some guarantees, etc. Plus, if you don't pay for it, or donate to it, one day it will be gone and you might feel sorry.
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
I would pay for additional features = pro account (stability, groups, counter, threads etc in one interface)... but I am just an ordinary user...
- Hanna Wiszniewska
ok, so maybe Toyota was a bad example http://tinyurl.com/99gkj7
- Jim Mitchem
enterprise version already exists look at http://www.yammer.com
- Andrew Mueller
Great ideas Robert. Twitter execs will appreciate it but I still think no business model will exist until they are acquired.
- Jeremy Campbell
from twhirl
yes, i think acquisition was their business model - but the economic crisis did dash hopes of a gold-plated one so they are thinking about value added services now (through the buy-in of sandy it seems "concierge" style message parsing is one option they are looking at. If you can buy, book, plan, coordinate things semi automatically via twitter there is value in there)
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
content partnerships,
- imran
Following on from the discussion re FF UI - this discussion shows a BIG issue - I had to expand 95 comments to see Robert's original 9 (and was that the best way to publish the list?) and now I can't compress them!
- Mark Warren
Mark: if you refresh the page they will be compressed again.
- Robert Scoble
At the very least, show Google Ads on search
- Varun Mahajan
I like the idea of selling aspects of the API as a SaaS. Also think they could very easily start charging consumers for Track and SMS.
- Clay Newton
They would do well to add the ability to do very robust data mining. You can imagine providing a set of business intelligence dashboards to track and analyze customer sentiment as well as real time trend analysis.
- Clay Newton
Virtual goods are a really solid idea as well. Look at what they are doing at Mahalo Answers. Mixes virtual $$ and real $. Twitter could easily implement a number of different levels here. They could also open up the API to provide even greater levels of functionality for app developers, essentially building a tiny-app framework.
- Clay Newton
they should sell market info from mining their data, It's a great source of customer data
- Tony Jones
from twhirl
tony: you then get into the murkey problem of is it their data? By the same standard your ISP could sell their data on your usage. Is it ethical and would your customer base accept it?
- alphaxion
I just posted the Social Networking Monetization Golden Goose idea yesterday at http://www.growmap.com/monetiz...
- Internet Strategist
@alphaxion - Advertisers will always be in the mix and are inevitable, they should do just in a way that doesn’t interfere with individual tweets/updates. Unless Twitter has an endless supply of financing, they’ll have to go to outside sources, (like subscribers/advertisers). I don’t see Twitter though offering so much value as to make it worth paying for. Not enough features. (ESPN.com has its insider pay service and still runs a ton of ads on the site, so having one rev. stream doesn’t eliminate another.)
- mtlb
Someone also mentioned a pay service for exclusive/breaking news on Twitter. First, I have Drudge for breaking news, but more importantly, part of the appeal of Twitter is that people like to feel they broke the news themselves. Why should Twitter or a select few decide what's breaking and what’s not and exclude the rest of the users from contributing to that?
- mtlb
I would pay good money for the ability to punch people over the internet.
- stretta
Make people pay to block other users! They'll get rich.
- Rae21
I was reading this long list of comments and then the system did its hiccup/update thing and it all went away and I had to spend time looking for the damn thread again. Freaking annoying!
- Rae21
@twitscoop Twitter data mining (strangely over looked) seems less like a business model then and more like a feature of the social network: transforming the data flow of one's social graph into usable information is why we stick around in the first place. Oh, I guess that does count as a business model.
- Brad Kligerman
I've noticed a couple companies contacting me directly via Twitter when I have made noise about their products. Obviously, people say a lot of things on Twitter about products they use... I agree with Patrick Pushor; "develop tools for professional/advanced use of twitter and charge for that level of service". Twitter should send a rep. to companies to show them how to use Twitter to improve their own products and service, by using Twitter Search to find out what consumers are saying about their products.
- Colleen
I wrote an article about twitter's fundamental problem yesterday. Essentially, all communication networks move toward being free. www.zachlandes.com
- Zach Landes