Sunday 25 October 2009

How to Monetise (and improve) Twitter

Simply create a charge for each tweet.

And if people had to pay they wouldn't send out so much rubbish!!!

One step better, send ALL the money to good causes, in fact that would be the USP for a platform that wanted to compete.

50 billion tweets @ 5p each = £2.5billion

Have a lovely Sunday, I'm cooking Roast Chicken - you're welcome to come over (but please call first!!!)

R

8 comments:

Stephen said...

Another way of acheiving this same result would be to charge Twitter Inc for each tweet. After all their lifetime value of a customer must be increasing everyday.

We could make them give back for the attention the world is giving to their technology.

Kev said...

I'm on my way Rachel with the hair, your door is big enough?

I won't be long, actually I can't come now sorry the dark roads with no lights scare me.

Have fun.

Kev

Anonymous said...

The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. As you do this the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume trends closer and closer to zero.
Charging for tweets will drive users elsewhere, which will drive down the overall value of the platform for both users and investors. Web business economics are very different from bricks and mortar business enconomics.
To get the necessary scale the sevice needs to be free to the consumer, then moentisation comes from other sources - such as premium services for business, or the sale of data to Bing and Google announced this week. Michael Bloomberg knows all about this kind of business model, and I think you will see Twitter following a similar sort of path in the coming months.

Mr C said...

I have enjoyed this blog over the last year or so. But alas all good things come to an end and rather than let my posts dwindle I thought it only proper to say I'm off and thank Rachel, Stephen, DLOG and others for keeping me entertained and informed.

Cheers guys
C

Stephen said...

How to improve Twitter.

[CTRL]+[ALT]+[DELETE]

Rachel Elnaugh said...

Mark

I think your views are embedded in old style scale & volume business - where the bigger something it is the better.

I'm more of a fan of Seth Godin; don't go for size and numbers, go for quality and intensity of passion.

For me the Twitter 'experience' is being diluted because of the sheer volume of rubbish tweets I now get.

And that's just from The Dlog... (only kidding!)

R

PS Goodbye Mr C, or should I say 'Au revoir'?

Anonymous said...

Oh if only I had checked this post yesterday, I would have been up for a roast chicken dinner :-)

Crystal said...

Charging for tweets would have only one effect: you would very quickly lose almost every single user that tweets just for fun and the only remaining users would be those using it to make money themselves (spam tweets, business tweets, sponsored tweets, etc). Before long, those types of tweets would become ineffective for the same reason that traffic surfing exchanges are ineffective - everyone using it is trying to promote their own businesses so no one is clicking on anyone elses' business tweets. So before long, those tweeters would stop paying and twitter would slowly die off.

Twitter should simply look into advertising options. They could charge a fortune for advertising on their sidebar or even for their own sponsored tweets if they wanted.