Making Twitter Pay
Much has been written – wrongly, I believe – about how Twitter lacks a business model. I reckon that anything that changes the scene as profoundly as Twitter has doesn’t need to have a business model. Certainly not at the start, and, quite possible never does. That isn’t to say that Twitter is condemned to be an eternal sinkhole of money and man-hours. Rather, that most business minds lack the foresight to intuit what this new thing can best be used for.
Just a few minutes ago I was “followed” on Twitter by DealsDirect.com.au, which is one web site that I allow to spam me every morning with their daily sales brochure. It’s mostly cheap plastic crap that’s turned out by the thousands of factories in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, but some of it – particularly the Manchester – is of good quality. (Some of the electronics on sale aren’t so bad – and most of that is made in China, whether you buy it from Apple or Lenovo.)
At the moment that I followed DealsDirect.com.au on Twitter – turning a one-way relationship into a bilateral connection – I had a brain wave. I immediately understood how Twitter can make their business model pay: they can charge for sending rich-media Tweet. I wouldn’t necessarily ever have the need to send a rich-media message, but DealsDirect will want to send mixed media messages, messages of arbitrary length, every time they reach out to me. It’s not enough to spruik a product with words – pictures are necessary. A “click to buy” button is necessary. And given the analysis that’s possible by looking at my tweetstream, it should be possible for the canny retailer to offer up exactly what I need, when I need it.
I don’t know that this would be a big change, technically, for Twitter. I rather doubt it would be. It would force a change on the various Twitter clients (Twhirl, TweetDeck, etc.) to accommodate the rich text messaging.
And, hey, I would pay for rich text messaging, once in a while. When it’s important. And if it’s easy and inexpensive to do so, I’m sure many of the other Twitteratti would do the same thing.
Tags: business, China, hyperconnectivity, Twitter
September 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
My first thought is that with the model that your suggesting I would end up with a dearth of adds filling my twitter stream. Then I reminded myself that this is an opt in system and I can choose who I follow. As you explained with DirectDeals. So yea, maybe there is something in the concept.
We just have to keep it so that we can flick those who abuse it from our stream.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Ad-supported? God, i hope not.
I’m still hoping (against reason) that they’ll go freemium.
But, given that recent implication that they’ve turned off the XMPP stream to make it a revenue-generator through selling keywords to marketers, you’re probably on the right track there.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
The challenge here is – show me the content. The key isn’t great writing – hell you only get 140 characters – the key is what can you deliver to a large group of people that they need to pay for, that they really want and will be a product that is useful – there are plenty of gimmicks that could perhaps generate revenue early on…and by rich-media do you mean like what they are doing at 12seconds.tv???
September 8th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
This doesn’t neccessarily need to involve twitter … so if it is something people want, then a third party can do it.
In a similar way to @name and #blahblah are interpreted as replies and hashtags by popular clients, you could use say a exclamation mark as a trigger to display a url inline in the message stream instead of as a link.
e.g.
Hey, look at my deals: !http://icanhazdealz.com/ab1kdjh2
And the client renders the contents of the url, instead of the original text. It also gracefully degrades for clients that don’t support the new convention, since you can click on the link as normal.
Once you have a web renderer like WebKit in the client, then you get all the goodness of buttons, images, video, animations, etc.
September 9th, 2008 at 8:37 am
I had already thought about the obvious ‘commercial’ Twitter requests-to-follow I had received (and denied). I concluded it was typical that an innovation was followed soon after by someone looking to make money off it. I never stopped to think directly that Twitter itself was left out of the loop, though I had thought “how will they make their money?” The rich media idea is a good one for them, the fact that it’s there would be good for all of us at some point for a specific reason. The fact that it is ‘opt in’ for following a commercial, rich-media-enable Twitterer/peddler (Tweddler?) is the idea’s saving grace.
September 9th, 2008 at 11:42 am
CNN News Anchor Rick Sanchez is using Twitter /Facebook /Myspace on his show at 3pm EST (US)
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/09/08/new-cnn-show-pushes-limits-twitter-literally