Comments on: Twitter’s Advertising Conundrum – Solved!

By: Twitter Advertiser

Twitter Advertiser — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:57:54 +0000

The interesting thing about Twitter is that it evolved AFTER people had figured out they could advertise in Social Media. So, the sentiment of “invasion” that goes along with things like myspace and facebook, where we first came for a friendly social time and then were bombarded with commercial messaging, is not really the same in Twitter. From day one, people were thinking of how Twitter could be used for their businesses. And, it’s grown up around that culture. I can’t imagine Twitter without the 50k+ follower moguls who are (I don’t care what anyone says) profiting from their popularity.

By: Roland Cailles

Roland Cailles — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:13:02 +0000

Mario, thanks for writing this. I just wrote about the Times article today also.
I joined Twitter a few weeks ago. I have 24 followers. not much, right?
I have a friend who joined about a month ago, and he has 400 followers already. I asked him how he did it. He simply responded, ‘I just started participating more.”
Which, adding to your point, is probably what I should do. I guess I just didn’t think anyone would be that interested in all the content I take in.
I’ll be sure to follow you, Mario.
Re: Twitter’s business plan, good article from the LA Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/12/twitter-ads.html#more

By: Gavin Hines

Gavin Hines — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:36:41 +0000

yeah they will surely fall if they did that

By: Alan Wolk

Alan Wolk — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:31:25 +0000

Mario:
I’m wondering if you’ve fallen into the trap of extrapolating the way the typical social media “expert” uses Twitter onto the population at large.
In other words, I doubt most people are going to rack up large numbers of followers and followees and in fact may choose to keep their Tweetstreams locked.
As new users flock in, people without anything (or themselves) to promote, the idea of following a “power user” will be as enticing as a plate of rancid anchovies. More likely, they’re going to just follow their real life friends (and maybe friends of those friends) and the occasional news source (e.g. @espn_nfl to get football scores) They’re just there for the conversation, so they’re far less open to marketing messages than someone who is already there to promote.
In addition, your proposal is likely to have a chilling effect on speech on Twitter. If I know that mentioning a scarf is going to bring up an ad for GQ, I’ll either not mention it or type something like “arf-scay” to avoid the ad.
I have no idea how Twitter might eventually make money other than to be a loss leader for something like Facebook or (possibly) to sell daily or time-slot sponsorships, so that when you logged on you saw that “Twitter. Brought to you by Starbucks. Home of the $1.50 tall coffee” or something like that. No idea how (or if) that could work with things like TweetDeck and the iPhone apps though.
Bottom line though is that Twitter is going to change when more people jump on board, people who are there for the conversation rather than the links or the self-promotion.

By: William

William — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:29:06 +0000

Hail to the Thieves
Facebook Connect, Google Open Social, and twitter the closed source content trap are all a slap in the face to the Open Principals of the internet.
Any developer and proponent of a truly Open web must take an active roll in pushing for the success of Laconica and OpenID and should not help to extend any closed source application.
Today we have no less than 3 closed source companies in a race to become the “Standard” for holding our Identity and therefore having access to the content that we read and creates. These companies will leverage our content to create revenue; giving nothing back to the content owners or to the community.
Why do developers especially Open Source developers continue to build and extend applications for closed source companies that under mind open source standards and ideals ?
Why do users continue to view giving control of their identity and content to these companies as a win, when in fact the win is clearly on the side of the company that you have allowed to take control of your identity and to generate value and revenue from your content. In return for our compliance we do not even have a right to take our identity and our content where we want.
Open Source developers, please do not write any code to extend the propitiatory services of closed source applications . They are not your “Friend” When you write code for these companies you undermine the integrity of the Open Web.

By: David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:14:25 +0000

I suspect that the best path to monetization would be for Twitter to place a cap on how many people can follow. That cap would be “pierceable” by some sort of fee, either in cash or in tweeting about a sponsor’s product. For casual users, who don’t care if 1000 people follow them, the service would remain free.
For business users who want more than 1000 (or 500 or 750 or whatever the cap would be) it would be worth paying.
It could work so that you pay for every increment of 100 visitors. It would make no sense to buy visitors, since the success of Twitter is that people opt in to follow specific people, but buying a new space to house another 1000 visitors would make sense.
Or it could work that, say, Proctor and Gamble wanted tweets about its new ceiling spot remover product, anyone over 5000 followers would have to Tweet about it.