How will Twitter ever make money?
Twitter is hugely popular, growing quickly, and has attracted lots of funding and worldwide buzz and all the other things a wildfire-on-the-way-to-greatness web start-up could ever hope for.
But how’s it ever going to make money?
That’s something that people have been discussing for a long time now. Aidan Henry, who I know from MappingTheWeb but is also now writing over at ReadWriteWeb these days (CongratsAidan!), posits a few interesting theorems today. In short, Aidan suggests doing contextual ads that run in Twitter feeds, an adwords-like system that auctions off ad space, or a tiered model with a free level of access and a subscription-level that allows people to get the site ad-free.
Personally, I like doing things simple and easy whenever possible. Although many people access Twitter through a mobile device or through applications like twhirl and twitterrific, there are large numbers who access it on the web, through twitter.com. Why not just put a leaderboard banner ad across the top of the page and perhaps a skyscraper ad underneath each person’s friends in the right column?
That way, each time anyone refreshes their page to receive new messages, and each time someone clicks around the site to browse, a new ad impression is created. Geotargeting or some other means of sending contextually relevant ads could further increase CPMs.
I think introducing ads into Twitter feeds could be a dangerous move. Even clearly labeling tweets as “sponsor messages” will annoy many people. It will also open the floodgates for more spam to be introduced. For example, if Twitter is sending sponsor messages, why can’t I send sponsor messages of my own? This could have an overall negative effect on what is currently a great and thriving and growing community.
Clearly these are all things that the people at Twitter are pondering. It’s a tough problem, adding a revenue model into the mix of an existing free service. I hope that Twitter can eventually figure out a system that works and does minimal harm to what is now a pretty special community.
