DISQUS

Tom Royce · 11 months ago

I agree, I would pay happily to keep Twitter going. Follow Flickr's model.

What Twitter can do is allow unlimited updates for paying users via the API and limit non payers to 50 updates per hour.

I would pay 30-50 dollars a year for the privilege and I am sure others would too.

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Jane Quigley · 11 months ago

I also think that there's something already in the works if there's this kind of valuation - we'll just have to wait and see. I believe the kind of positions and recruiting they're doing right now speaks to a business model that hasn't seen the light of day yet.

Srinivasan · 11 months ago

It would b quite a challenge to monetize it without losing the average followers. As long is it is free the sign ups and usage would continue growing at the current phenomenal pace and even accelerated pace.

May be the large corporates with big budgets could pay to use it for large number of business oriented updates.

Kate Dickman · 11 months ago

I certainly wouldn't mind paying a bit of a fee for a good service like Twitter.

@Tom Royce... 50 updates per hour? Do you mean per day or per week? I don't even do 50 updates per day and if it's a slow week, per week. It will be interesting to see how they monetize.

Although we are all sick of ads infiltrating every site, perhaps they could incorporate short text ads in the feeds? Annoying I know but it would keep the site free for all.

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Kate Dickman · 11 months ago

Oops... let me replace "feeds" with the word "streams".

Kate Dickman's last blog post..Let the Conversation Begin! Listen First?

Andy Beal · 11 months ago

@Tom - I think some kind of premium to unlock more requests from the API would be one I would pay for. I easily use up 100 API requests an hour--which appears to be the limit--because I'm not only checking my stream, but also @s, DMs, and Twitter searches.

Kate Dickman · 11 months ago

People as influencing as you Andy certainly use it more than a small-timer such as myself :) I guess I would not have to pay that extra money to have unlimited API requests but hopefully someday I will. The question is, how many users are as active as Andy who would need that many requests? (I actually honestly don't know.) So perhaps they could even make the premium option be half that.

Kate Dickman's last blog post..Let the Conversation Begin! Listen First?

Todd Mintz · 11 months ago

"...most people use Twitter for non-business chats..."

Andy, in our little corner of the Twitterverse, I'm not sure I'd agree with you since you (and I and every other user of the service) are our own brand and the totality of each of our conversations reflect upon that brand which (directly or indirectly) impacts business (even if some of the tweets aren't business related).

Andy Beal · 11 months ago

@Todd - sure, some folks don't realize that their tweets impact their business/brand, but I would suspect that a large majority of Twitter users do not consider it to be a business tool.

Jane Quigley · 11 months ago

I actually believe that the monetization of Twitter will come less through ads and tiered-pay models, then from partnerships (which is one of the positions they've been recruiting for is about). Although, like Andy, I'd pay for an extended plan for over the 100API call limit.

Russ · 11 months ago

There's a lot of online user data in Twitter that I'm sure Google would love to have.

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Louis Adekoya · 11 months ago

Taken from a post I wrote last year:

"...Twitter is all about people. As a user you follow people and people follow you. But what if you could follow not just people but objects as well? Objects like products, services, websites etc. Anything that someone has an interest in promoting and which one or more people might be interested in getting updates (object-tweets) about."

then:

"Object-tweet accounts could operate under a freemium model whereby the object-tweet account holder gets a certain number of free tweets per month and pays a premium for the ability to send and receive more tweets about the object per month."

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Douglas Karr · 11 months ago

It still sounds significantly overvalued. One thing that disturbs me about a lot of these valuations is that it's based on the number of accounts. "Accounts" don't take into consideration whether or not the user is human, alive, active, engaged, duplicate, abandoned...

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Charles Sipe · 11 months ago

I would propose that Twitter monetize by adding sponsored tweets for every 100 updates you receive. Users would be able to pay for a premium account that would be free of ads. I think advertisers would pay big money to reach 6 million cell phones. However it can't be overly intrusive, thus the 1 ad per 100 updates and an option to opt out of ads for a small fee.

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Jacob · 11 months ago

I currently have 5 Twitter streams but have to manage them all seperately, using different email addresses for each. I'd pay to link all the accounts and have some kind of dashboard to manage them all from.

Sam Saber · 11 months ago

I'd pay a monthly sub to twitter, as I rekon it's worth it.

Advertising shifts the agenda to the advertisers and frankly I am weary of the way it's forced in my face. Like many I tune out and even block a lot of it. So where is the value for advertisers?

If a service as good as twitted can't be user funded then it really needs to find a way of better expressing it's actual value.

Sam.
@samotage

fasblog · 10 months ago

They dont need to ask money from you, they can ad their adverts like facebook has.

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