Dan Farber of CNet proposes a business model for Twitter — a subscription model. He adds $5 would be enough for Twitter to survive but cheap enough for Tweeters to willingly dole out. Would people pay to Tweet? I think so.
Twitter is basically a blogging service (on a micro scale, that is). If you place it side by side with mainstream blog platforms such as WordPress.com, Blogger and TypePad, there’s actually not much difference. So, if people are willing to buy credits on WordPress.com or pay monthly subscriptions on TypePad, why not Twitter?
TypePad starts at $4.95, WordPress.com feature upgrades cost $1 a credit and regular hosting and domain will set you back a couple of dollars a month. Technically, people are willing to pay to be able to blog. Twitter could follow a similar business model.
Option A: Flat Payments. Once Twitter reaches critical numbers (and can no longer get additional funding), they can switch all account to paid accounts (30 days notice). Annual subscriptions can start at $25 (similar to fee as Flickr Pro) with unlimited features. That’s just about $2 a month.
Option B: Tiered Plans. Basic plans will be free but number of messages will be limited to say 100 tweets a day (according to stats, active Tweeters send 105 messages a day). You can then upgrade to 500 tweets per day for $2/month or unlimited for $5 a month.
Option C: Free, Ad-Supported Credits. Tweeters receive one (1) Twitter ad for every 10 sent. I’m sure advertiser take-up will grow once they know they can insert their brands into the conversation. There’s more exposure and it’s more effective so a 10:1 tweet to ad ratio might be enough to support it.
Option D: Feature Upgrades. Just like WordPress.com, Twitter can offer premium upgrades to paying users. This would also include dedicated tech support, ability to change themes or edit design, guaranteed uptime and use of domains names, etc. Maybe twitter can offer a Friend Feed feature to premium users too.
The sooner Twitter can find ways to monetize itself, the sooner it can fix some of its growth/scaling problems. When competitor Pownce enter the same market, it wasn’t able to gather much attention (Kevin Rose once hinted there are over 100k Pownce users) but they were still able to figure out monetization from day one. There’s also Google’s Jaiku which nobody seems to be taking notice.
Question is, how much of the over 1 million subscriber base of Twitter are willing to pay up for the service?
No, I wouldn’t pay to tweet :/
Option C is good enough I guess, when you download twitterific for free, you’d get an advertisement every hour and it’s nice for me and it’s very unobstrusive. I guess because most of the ads are design/development specific. I guess if they do with Option C, it boils down with what kind of ads they’re going to show.
Plus, if they’re going to add a fee, I believe it’s better to make the API users (developers, yes) pay for it since they’re the ones who’re exhausting twitters’ resources and not the users per se. And yes, that’s because I’m cheap lol
I’m using both Twitter and Jaiku, so I probably would just drop Twitter.
twitter should remain as it is
I agree with Bigbird, they will just shift to Jaiku or the other competitors of Twitter. It will be like Flickr with the loyal and power users opting to pay up for its services.
Helpfull link on how you can access twitter on your mobile phone to a much cheaper cost. http://pinoytwitters.com/
All will shift to Jaiku
twitter has competition
what’s twitter?!?
Would you pay 25 million for ars technica?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/16/breaking-conde-nastwired-acquires-ars-technica/
No way… I don’t need it anyway!
Will not work especially with Jaiku and Pownce having more features and free-of-charge.
Twitter is still holding the #1 spot simply because they were the first to offer the service (although Jaiku came out first, but it wasn’t the same service as Twitter at first).
People will just move to Jaiku and/or Pownce, and Google will grab that chance and release Jaiku to the public (it’s still in invite mode).
i don’t wanna pay to twitttt.. :(
Why would I pay for a blogging service which caters only on a micro scale!?
A New Social Media Optimized Site(optimize your technorati faves, digg, etc., and also optimized exchange links)
Option B would make people to Unfollow you when you sent like 100+ Tweets per day based on the Twitterquette [lol] 5 is just enough, but yeah I would pay for Twitter.