Twitter Rumours False, It Will Not Start Charging For Services
The rumours of Twitter having actually come up with a revenue model have turned out to be nothing more than a game of Chinese whispers between the blogging community. No, Twitter is not going to start charging companies for use of service on their website, as was reported by various publications.
The rumour has been spiked on the Twitter corporate blog, where Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, wrote, ‘It’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. We are still very early in the idea stage and we don’t have anything to share just yet despite a recent surge in speculation.’
It would be an awful hassle to actually deal with money that didn’t arrive in a big sack from whichever VC source you’ve managed to hustle, wouldn’t it Biz?
It leaves us to wonder, what will Twitter’s revenue plan be? The Internet community seems to have lots of ideas about exactly what the micro-blogging site should do to monetise on the site, which has been without a plan since its conception three years ago. Especially as Biz Stone doesn’t seem that bothered about the problem.
The finalists of a Silicon Alley Insider competition to come up with a Twitter business plan were listed on January 11. The winner was a a social media marketing group called Denuology, who proposed that Twitter could charge for market research information and the ability to question Twitter users who choose to opt in to the programme. The Silicon Alley Insider then e-mailed the plan to the head honchos at Twitter, which kicked off the frenzy of blog rumours about Twitter ’selling out’.
Some of the other ideas in the Insider’s top 11 were: a Gumtree-like marketplace for buying and selling in Twitter; charging for access to better Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and software development tools; and suggesting ads that users could ‘re-tweet’ to followers to earn ‘Twitter Bucks’ that could be redeemed for cash.
No doubt the blog realm will continue to speculate and whisper (and how we love to do that) until an announcement is finally made, if ever.
Posted by Trista Orchard in Sci-tech | February 11, 2009 2:43PM |
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I don’t think a micro-transaction system would work for a service like Twitter without alienating a huge slice of the population who frequent the site.
Maybe advertisers could embed targeted ads in specific keyword/hash tag searches that directly relate to the topic. This could also work with companies who are trying to promote a specific campaign.
Like a search for #coffee would bring up an ad for a coffee house or brewing company.