16 Responses

Eric Northam

June 25th, 2010 at 2:50 am

It could work although the idea of charging Ashtun Kutcher, Drew Carey or whatever your favorite celebrity is money for their accounts doesn’t seem to be a good strategy. I also wonder how many twitter users have over 10,000 followers that would be willing to pay vs. the users that share follows and use other means to up their follower count that are probably less inclined to actually pay. I’m skeptical that Twitter would have a big enough market with this strategy.

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Brian Armstrong

June 25th, 2010 at 7:11 am

What is it worth for Ashton Kutcher to directly communicate with 5 million of his fans? You don’t think he’d pay $99/month for that? Remember he is easily spending $10,000-$20,000 a month on a PR firm and agent whose job it is to build him as a brand. Trust me, he isn’t gonna miss 100 bucks.

And yes – only 1-2% of twitter users will likely pay in this model. That’s how most freemium products are and it works out great.

There are 80 million Twitter users. If just 1% of them paid $10 a month that is $96 million in revenue annually. Their burn rate is only $20 million annually at their current size.

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Eric Northam

June 25th, 2010 at 1:59 pm

I don’t think the money is the issue but the idea that you’re going to force those users who market and help drive the creation of the most Twitter accounts take extra steps to pay and the idea of charging might cause a backlash.

I would like to know how many users actually have 10,000 followers or more. 1% of 80 million is 800,000. Are there more than 800,000 accounts with 10,000 followers or more? I doubt it. And if so what percentage would be willing to pay.

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Chris Guthrie

June 25th, 2010 at 6:58 am

I think the idea makes too much sense for them to implement. But in either case it doesn’t seem like enough money IMO. I think it should be more like 50 for 10,000

Random note: how is your start up going? I’ve been meaning to send you an email

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Sterling Newkirk

June 25th, 2010 at 7:24 am

Twitter is sadly a difficult model to monetize as a small business with < 10K followers. At that point, it does make sense to pay for using the platform. My sites have Twitter presences and it is good for grabbing the occasional lookie-loo, but outside of that it's not terribly effective in small doses.

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Brian Armstrong

June 25th, 2010 at 5:31 pm

Agreed – less than 10k followers shouldn’t have to pay.

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Unstoppable Family

June 25th, 2010 at 11:31 pm

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Sam

June 25th, 2010 at 11:31 pm

The main assumption you are making is that twitter is predominantly for businesses using monetising strategies… In fact, twitter was originally created as quite the opposite… To be used as a micro-blogging platform!

Second to this is they would have to change the whole structure of the followers and following system to implement your suggestion. The user is not in control of who follows them and consequently will not be able to control how much their account expands (and hence is charged). For example, I have amassed a following of almost 15,000 users, simply by writing interesting tweets and getting retweeted often, yet I still wouldn’t pay to use the service (as I doubt many of the celebrities using it for non-commercial aspects would either). The knock-on effect of followers being ‘deprived’ of genuine updates and only being left with spamming marketers would make the system fall flat in my opinion.

I’m sure twitter have thought it through more thoroughly than both of us anyway. :)

Sam

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Brian Armstrong

June 25th, 2010 at 11:56 pm

“twitter is predominantly for businesses using monetising strategies”
Agreed that’s not true, but anyone with more than 10k followers is deriving a benefit from it in some way. There are lots of ways to derive benefit from having “influence” without directly selling something:

- let others know about events and meetups
- feel important and that people are listening to you
- build yourself as a brand
- get speaking gigs
- drive traffic to friends and causes

As a programmer I can tell you the code changes to implement this are not substantial, especially compare to lists or other features they have launched.

Spammy marketers don’t derive much value from Twitter compared to people who use it genuinely I think. The ones who use it genuinely have the most to gain and are more likely to pay. Someone like @garyvee.

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Mar

June 27th, 2010 at 6:05 pm

Is it just an empty box or a Pandorian one, with all these suggestions of monetizing Twitter?

It’s amazing what 140 characters or less leads to and, in a way, I’m really glad that there hasn’t been any ad spam in tweets that I’ve received or sent (I’ll get to this in a while).

Monetizing seems inevitable eh? While most school of thoughts are bent towards the premium/freemium model, there are some that arches towards the Adsense/Adwords model. Like why not?

This reply slants towards the latter and as an example, when you search Google for, say “Ipanema Beaches”, you’re most likely to get results which includes resorts and air tickets to get to Ipanema. All these and more in little snippets of Adwords, tucked in one corner of your browser.

Why can’t Twitter get successful as well? TwitSense/TwitWords!

TwitSense/TwitWords (or whoever gets to come up with naming this model might call it~) might include 2-3 WORD LINKS at the end of a tweet that’s related to whatever subject that’s being tweeted, and while some might view this as spam (getting back to its mention since my intro), I’d view it as targeted ad campaign, that perhaps only Twitters with less than 10000 followers get to ‘be bugged with’.

Why less? Let’s say Twitter declares it as a challenge (or reward) for users of its system to get to 10000 followers and get ads taken off their tweets. This way, while users build and work/expand rigorously to reach that milestone, they’re really driving more ads as a result. I say let the users drive the growth, while chasing for that ‘Ads Free Tweets’.

Who doesn’t want to get rewarded?

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Prabu Rajasekaran

July 27th, 2010 at 5:25 pm

Your idea is cool.

And to that, we could have a points system too: if my tweet gets RTed so many times, I get more reputation and less chance of being TwitWorded.

If persons with more reputation follow me, I get more points and so on. Just like Google’s PageRank.

And if I’m a business I get to remove the ads by paying a fee.

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bobby

July 6th, 2010 at 4:03 pm

how do you guys get your avatar pics on here?

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Sam - Sparklife.info

July 6th, 2010 at 10:36 pm

There are several services that do it but I use gravatar.com. Then everytime you comment with that registered e-mail address the picture will appear! :)

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Brian Armstrong

July 7th, 2010 at 12:58 am

Yep it’s gravatar.

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bobby

July 7th, 2010 at 1:48 am

cool, thanks guys!

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Liam

August 1st, 2010 at 10:03 am

I would flip on on it’s head – new joiners have to pay a 99c ‘registration fee’ – with a on going 99c a month charge until they have X followers or post per month.

Might help stop the spam/sock puppet accounts.

But better to have the masses paying a small amount with an incentive to be more active, than penalise those who are popular…?

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