Twitter’s monetisation options

Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by admin in Twitter

Edit: This post was written yesterday before Techcrunch leaked the hacked Twitter documents so Iwill do an updated post. Anyway, here are my thoughts from yesterday …

There has been lots of talk and speculation about just how Twitter will monetise their service, they have kept very quiet about their plans so far but it cant be very far away now. We have even seen leaked documents of their financial forecasts predicting $millions in revenue, so just how do they expect to achieve it? In this post I will throw out a few ideas.

1. Premium Accounts

There are a number of things twitter could offer to users who pay a monthly fee for a premium account and I know, I for one, would definately pay up for them :

Allow you to add more users per day than the current limit of 500 – maybe up this to 2000 or so and it would allow you to grow your followers 4 times as fast.
Verified account, if you’re a brand or celebrity you could pay to have the verified tick next to your account.
Analytics, they could offer some indepth analytics about your account – amount of new followers per day, click throughs on your links, retweet rates etc.
Access to improved customer support, the support at the moment is a bit erratic – premium subscribers could get access to a priority support representative.
No advertising, see below.

2. Sponsored Tweets

How about charging you to send out a sponsored tweet to x amount of people based on their interests. The receivers would not have to be a follower of yours – the tweet would appear in their timeline anyway.

So for every, 50 normal tweets you receive, you also receive a sponsors tweet. If you wanted to opt out of these – you could upgrade to a premium account, see above. I would be very interested in this, imagine being able to send a tweet offering a web design service to 1000 people who had expressed an interest in finding one? Or sending a voucher code for your ecommerce store to people who had been tweeting about your products ? I think this could be a killer idea.

3. Pay Per Click advertising

We have allready seen evidence of this around twitter with the addition of links to various twitter apps and websites in the sidebar. Its possible they have been testing this for free to find out click through rates, tweaking the ad serving software.

With 20 million+ unique visitors per month to the domain twitter.com, that’s a huge audience which can be utilised. If they implemented a Google Adwords style system where people can bid on keywords to appear on people’s profiles and in search results I think it would be a great success. They could even partner with Google and use their existing system to implement the ads.

4. Charging developers

A lot of web apps and websites are making a lot of money from Twitter when the main site is not yet! An income stream could be charging developers for usage of their API – a tiered system could be put in place where its free to use but once your app is popular and making x amount of calls then y0u could be charged. Im not advocating this method as one of the reasons for Twitter’s success is all the add-on apps so it would be a bit of a kick in the face to the developers. A better way may be to keep the API free but offer premium developer accounts with access to more resources, future developments, priority help etc.

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