I've heard all the ideas for how Twitter can make money:
- Charge a subscription fee for using the service
- Charge businesses for corporate Twitter accounts
- Sell the Recommended User placements (which Jason Calacanis has offered $250k for)
- Sell sponsored tweets that would appear in your feed (ala Twiterrific)
- Charge for re-tweets
Now I'd like to add mine...
- Charge 10 cents for each character over 140 per tweet.
Who hasn't found themselves struggling to shorten their thought to meet Twitter specs? Are you telling me you wouldn't pay $1 to get that last word in? And surely corporations would pay a good $5-10 per tweet to deliver an extended commercial message to their followers. Still cheaper than a CRM email blast. And they'd be even more inclined to pay up if tweets over 140 characters received some sort of premium placement in people's feeds.
What do you think? Is micropayments for overage the silver bullet for Twitter?
Update 3/24: Here's one more way for Twitter to monetize...
Yesterday, I executed the first (as far as I know) successful drug deal via Twitter. Granted, it was just an OTC decongestant but Danny tweeted that he was stuffed up and I happened to be nearby with a pill in my pocket. I'm sure Danny would've been happy to pay Twitter a commission for brokering that deal.
Update 9/16: Just posted to the Connectual blog on 4 ways Twitter can make money through advertising without pissing off its user-base and delivering strong ROI for marketers.
2 comments:
Some sort of small fee per character over the base 140 is pretty good.
I have little faith that Twitter will do the right thing.
140 characters is the maximum for mobile phone text messages. You'd lose a whole segment of your readership if you went 140+
Post a Comment