7) Charge companies that use the Twitter API -- Twitter’s API has been used to build some cool applications -- Twitterrific and Twhirl come to mind. And the API has at least 10x the amount of traffic of the Website, according to Williams. All the companies that are using the Twitter API can profit from the use of it with no benefit to Twitter. If Twitter continued to allow the free use of the API, with an understanding that they would get a percentage of all earnings based on profits, there would be some immediate revenue. Another suggestion is to charge for API requests with request-rate surcharges.
8) Affiliate program -- Users are recommending products, services, restaurants, stores and countries to visit all day long on Twitter. An affiliate program would allow users to sign up to start making money on some of their recommendations. If a user recommends a product that is part of the program, the user -- as well as Twitter -- would get a percentage of the sale.
9) List rental -- This may be a very Web 1.0 idea, but if Twitter put its opt-in email list on the market, it would earn a pretty penny.
10) Mobile payments -- This idea comes courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider, and it’s a good one. The P2P mobile payment market is wide open, and Twitter has the stuff in place to be able to capitalize.
These are just some of the many ways that Twitter could start making money quickly. Until it decides on a business model, however, Twitter will keep growing its audience while getting its cash the old-fashioned way -- through VC funding.
Follow Melissa Chang on Twitter @mchang16. She is the founder of Pure Incubation, an Internet incubator based in the Boston area, and has a blog at 16thletter.com.
More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:
- Prediction: Twitter starts serving ads stateside
- Analysis: Is Twitter worth $75 million? $150 million? How about none of the above?
- Analysis: Just 200,000 active Twitter users?
- Analysis: Twitter: Fanatical users help build the brand, but not revenue
- Analysis: Five reasons why a recession is a good time to start a company
- News: Journalist saved by Twitter aims to start a Twitter-driven emergency network
Comments
I'm not sure banner advertising is the way to go (does anyone even bother with banners any more?)
And would paid posts take off? Or would users (the people that will be receiving the posts) leave in droves if they're effectively being spammed? Maybe it could work on an optin basis, but there would have to be a good reason to opt in.
Actually, thining aloud, if Twitter did go the banner ad route, then maybe peopl could have the choice of either paying for banner free access, or opting in to receive advertising messages as a way to remove banners? Not sure that the majority of users would like it though.
It neds handling carefully, IMO, or Twitter could lose even more users to Plurk et al.
Simply selling official FailWhale merch could probably bring them into the black in a week :)
Text-based, content-relevant ads (e.g. Google) would seem to be a natural fit as well (plop it in the sidebar, with an occasional one in the twitstream itself (which pushes out to all the twitter RSS feeds as well?)
There's a lot of ways Twitter /shouldn't/ monetize their platform, so let's hope they get it right.
Im skeptical about the banner ads. I think, text-based tweets could be option, but it should be non-intrusive.
The SMS idea is good...they should be getting their share of that IYAM
Jon,
I ordered a customized failwhale shirt and it never appeared. My failwhale shirt failed, so that is not scalable even if it is profitable.
I would caution against API fees...learned the hard way at Y! that it causes friction and generates impossible SLA and licensing freedom expectations.
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