@Twitter Revenue Model Proposals Abound #metoo
I just finished reading Saeed’s post on Ideas for Twitter’s Revenue Model, and it was, of course, a good read. I’ve been meaning to write up my ideas as well, and it’s just never taken priority. By the time I finished typing up my comments at On Product Management, I realized I had a full blog post, so I just copied and pasted here instead. Enjoy!
Inspired By: (And about a million other blog posts I’ve read)
Ideas for Twitter’s Revenue Model – pt. 2 « On Product Management
It’s fun trying to figure out how and when Twitter is ever going to monetize the service. I think as fans we really want them to succeed, because we value the service so much and would hate to see it go away.
I’m a proponent of a four-fold revenue model for Twitter. Don’t limit it to four necessarily, but these are the biggies in my estimation:
1. In-stream advertising on the website. There is a tremendous amount of targeting data available to twitter to ensure that ads are relevant and highly targeted. The revenue from in-stream advertising may not move the needle much on its own, but it will drive people to more lucrative revenue producing access methods. Possibly consider upgrade to premium account removing advertising.
2. Tweet throttling based on account type. Free members would be limited to, say 10 updates per day (maybe even with the exception of DM and direct @ replies), while Premium members would be able to update more frequently. This takes a different approach to monetizing celebrities and power users. Trying to charge based on number of followers or follows I fear would devalue the service as a whole, unless the thresholds were extremely high. But monetizing heavier tweet volumes with a fairly low price would go a long way toward generating revenue on the users who actually cost the most to serve.
3. API Throttling based on account type. I propose all users be given access to an API key for their third party clients. Free users would be throttled to, say 5 – 10 API calls per hour, while premium users would get today’s standard 100(I think) and an elite or super-premium user would have a non-throttled (or nearly non-throttled) account. The Twitter API is one of the key reasons for it’s exceptional growth, and is one of the main value propositions of the service, even with all of its weaknesses. It is hard to think of anyone anywhere who has the volume of raw data available through APIs that twitter offers and, in my opinion, the company is absolutely insane to not be monetizing this. Note that I am still proposing that all this data be available for free, as it is today, through the Twitter.com website. It is access via third party tools that should be monetized.
4. Brand protection/resolution. Update the TOS to make free accounts subject to required name change in certain special scenarios. Allow brands to purchase their brand name. This will probably create a little negative PR in the process and there are definitely some challenges to implementation, and I’ve got some ideas for how to make it happen. Premium accounts would have the ability to apply for a username that matches their legal name or a registered trademark. In cases of conflicting names and trademarks, a combination of first-come, first-served and an auction/compensation system would be used to resolve. Twitter waited to long to protect brand names from the beginning, so squatters own names like twitter.com/kraftfoods. Twitter does have the ability to resolve this now and I think the financial motivation to do so.
What are your thoughts?
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