A brnad monitoring API that allows third parties to collect the raw data for product mentions and specific elements of language containing issues of redress.

Make one API and dashboard free and basic, and the paid version feature rich, with connections to BI and data viz.

This model could start making money on day two.

It's an instant revenue model that can be implemented quickly. I know I'd pay for a pro account if the price is reasonable.

As for the acid tests:
- I would love to be marketed to this way. If someone spent a dollar to answer my specific problem, it's likely useful to me. Oh, and I get $50 too!
- as a buyer, $1 is not much for this ultra-targeted (i.e. incredibly successful) way to market: you are basically answering someone's problem with your products minutes after then expressed the need for it.

Seriously, though, I think Alan's got a great idea. Companies would pay for that from the customer satisfaction budget.

That being said - given Biz's concerns about making anyone "mad" I'm not sure he will want to irritate developers.

That being said - given Biz's concerns about making anyone "mad" I'm not sure he will want to irritate developers.

I would Suggest to Evan that like your Twitter Concept is new and Amazing, your monetizing idea and idea too should be different and amazing....

I also second the pro-api idea as well.

I like @Alan Wilensky "Brand Monitoring API" passes the acid test, but not sure this could be the primary revenue stream.

Wish I had something to contribute... I'll keep thinking!

Charge advertisers, depending on timing of tweet and other super-wicked-cool factors, to send a targeted global tweet out. Heck, even allow a double-sized tweet for extra $$s (more than 140 characters).

They could get creative and do some profiling fields in the sign-up process to give people different automatic follows, and then target the paid tweets that way out.

Acid tests...
1. Do not irritate/interrupt the user and even occasionally add value to the user.
- These would be offers, can meet a certain set of requirements to ensure they are not spam stupid, and don't irritate or interrupt because it is an EASY opt-out (just unfollow).

2. Provide a value proposition that is so compelling that even conservative buyers give it a try.
- It's a tweet, therefore it's easy to execute and could come out cheap to buy.

My 2 cents.

1. "Its the data, stupid". Thanks Alan. That could be it. It sounds "not Web 2.0 orthodoxy" and that alone makes me like it. But how big can this be?

2. "Targeted ads". Maybe. It sounds a bit "Google wannabee". But Twitter is also mobile and real time. Something that got me exactly what I needed exactly at the right time and location aware....

3. Paid service. Sounds like something companies do. But consumers, really? Would kill their growth ramp.

What is interesting is that it probably is a binary choice.

The combos don't make much sense. For example: "free if you will take ads, pay if you want to avoid ads". Lets see if I have the pitch "we can deliver the audience that has no money"?

Twitter should go for a low subscription fee a la flickr pro - I would certainly consider paying it, whereas if ads show up I'll stop using the system straight away.

-Offer location-centric tweets and offers that people can opt-in to. For example: "Get $5.00 off your pizza at Tony's Pizzaria tonight between 5pm-7pm by mentioning this tweet".

Any monetisation model needs to stick within that and retain the twitter feel we all love.

I suggest then, micro upgrades:
- $0.50/month for Twitter Analytics: who do you talk to the most / how many people visit your twitter page / how many click to your page / blog / how many clicks on all your links.
- $0.50/month Ability to message whole network instantly (would self regulate as if i get sick of messages from you I stop following)

Those are just a couple, but I think each upgrade would have to certain criteria such as:

- Not dilute the experience had by others
- Add value to the user
- Arouse curiosity,

Keep all to $0.50/month or $5/year, these small micro payments would be in align with the twitter community

This isn't a strictly freemium feature, as people already love twitter as it is, moreso an extra feature for certain user types.

Alternatively another model I thought was to use Twitter as a platform for Micro payments (read more here: http://blog.bwagy.com/microfunding/). Where user's can simply tweet a tip to a website.

Thoughts?

so people who don't donate might have a red light by their tweets or something. people that donate a little get a yellow, people who donate an average amount get a green light. people who go above and beyond get a blue star or something special to show that they have made an exceptional effort to support the community.

have it calculate daily or something non-intensive, but make sure as with all donation systems that everything is 100% transparent to users. it could work

Decide on a value for each message; perhaps per-character. This might be as low as 0.01 cents, or lower. I'd be willing to pay, but that also requires an uptime guarantee from twitter. 3 9's?
Ads might work, might not; I never look at them or click on them.

...I follow 100s of people, but I only have a tiny handful, less than 20, set to hit my phone. Maybe to be lease evil Biz could B2B "Device Updates On/Off" to the carriers, bind it to text messaging packages.

Also, and beta testers of the new Twitter here? Sound off.

There's all this data about people flowing into twitter that governments and PR agencies would KILL for! Why isn't it being sold to these people?

... google does it ...

That said, there is value in Twitter and a biz model really is nothing more than translating some of that value into money. The question is how to do that without killing the value. To answer THAT, we need to look at who receives the value and how much value they receive.

1) Power Tweeters. These people have thousands of followers. They get value because they can reach all of those people on demand. That's huge from an influence point of view. Value is in the size of the audience... so charge people to have more than, say, 1000 followers AND give them analytics so they can see information about their followers.

2) Companies. Comcast etc get to use Twitter to monitor their brand. Give them tools to better do this and give them some want to integrate this into a CRM system so that issues can be tracked. Perhaps make that transparent and use someone like getsatisfaction to aggregate issues.

2a) Sell anonymized, aggregate data about the network to analysts, companies etc.

3) Give people a way to pay. This might be a refinement to #1 or a different thing, but there's probably an intermediate level between people like me who have a handful of followers and people who have thousands. Maybe it's free up to some number that lets you and your friends and family chat (250 or so?) but $20 per year over that.

Stay away from ads though - ads would kill twitter. As someone says above much of the appeal of twitter is the signal, no noise aspect.

Brand monitoring is a large market when applied to the mid-sized intermediaries, not the multinationals that have been the target of many Web based brand monitoring via sentiment analysis companies.

In order to take over this market, the retailers and distributors have to be able to analyze consumer complaints against the retail program incentive systems that they participate in.

Most of the market entrants that are pitching brand monitoring only go for brand owners - they are almost all destined to be out of business in less one year.

you can see the analysis here: http://bizcast.typepad.com/clients/2007/10/open-bid-to-the.html

The key here is to make the advertisements come as a response to user action. Adverts that come at random are spam and should be avoided at all costs.

Examples (Jane is the twitter bot):

Me: dreaming of hawaii...
Jane: @me Cheapest time to visit Hawaii is next month. Flights available from $678: http://tinyurl.com/....

Me: Vista sucks. Why am I still using this thing?
Jane: @me Apple just updated their MacBooks. Check them out at http://tinyurl.com/...

The media will pay Twitter for the amount of people who subscribe to their feed.

Users will subscribe to the feeds to get rewareded with prizes and free gifts from daily competitions.

The media will get to promote their product (a tv show on MTV, or a new movie coming out) through the competitions, the user will get free gifts, and twitter will get paid.

Twitter is a communication tool. My hunch is that their optimal business model will be similar to online email and IM services. Hotmail, Gmail, AIM, GTalk, and other communication products don't account for much revenue, but they give people a reason to visit Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN and other sites on a daily basis. Twitter's best business model is to sell the company to a portal (ex. Yahoo!), a mobile provider (ex. AT&T), or a device manufacturer (ex. Apple). All the other ideas presented here have been applied to online email and IM, but the resulting revenue pales in comparison to the indirect revenue associated with bundling the service as a free loss leader.

"Blogsourcing" - An act of asking your blog readers to give ideas because you are so brain dead and tired of blogging.

Usage: Holy cow dude today I blogsourced the problem of monetizing Twitter and I got fucking 150 replies from the suckers.. sweet dude.

Also, Twitturly is already working on one of the ideas presented on this page. ;-) It is scheduled to come out very soon.

How about a chilling effect on so-called businesses with no revenue? Or maybe a chilling effect on throwing money at enterprises that don't have any way of returning that investment? That would be a good thing.

They could always launch "groups" and charge for them.

The key to monetizing Twitter is IMHO targeted, location-based advertising. The whole service is meant for a mobile device, and apps like Twitterrific on the iPhone exemplify this. How about charging companies to advertise in a geographic area?

Imagine if I'm checking my twitter feed on the go, and also get a "ad-twitter" about a sale in the store next door. This sort of advertisement is worth much more than strict, traditional web ads, as the consumer in this case has *far less* investment in order to act on the ad. The response and return on investment per-eye would be higher than almost any web ad. Especially if these ads are targeted by interest, either through historical keyword searches or whatever. Advertisers also know that their ads are hitting the right people - if you get my ad, you are guaranteed to be within, say, a mile of my stores, and have expressed interest in my sort of products.

This works on desktops also, though less accurately, through networks like Skyhook.

If they can pull this off - get enough advertisers for users to be excited about this feature, and target it well enough to be seamless like AdSense, then this will be a hit. I personally would LOVE to have a service that tells me about things going on in my area, especially if it doesn't bug me about it (i.e. I go fetch this info) and piggy-backs it on data I *already* desire (my friends' twitter feeds).

as for twitter.com, i think they should leverage their own tech and start to hire people as micro-content creators specializing in certain niche markets. within these data streams, adwords can sporadically be injected and each person/data stream can have a companion website.
Basically, just do what other blog networks do such as gawker.
Except the people work for twitter. Twitter can evolve out of its micro-blogging shell and be a brand where micro-blogging is a component of. Likewise, other networks can be started and promoted by twitter, for a fee.

I don't think twitter should try to monetize specifically on the tech platform. They need to look beyond what they have built and just make sure it is a critical piece, but not all that twitter is. That's how I see the twitter evolution and how they can be a successful multi-faceted company.

Sull

Twitter could even negotiate bundled packages with the cellphone carriers in which twitter messages are separated from their billing from other text messages. "T-Mobile announces their Twitter package. $3.99 per month for unlimited Twitter messages."

No annoyance impact to the end user. Benefit to carriers through continued growth of text message revenue, and benefit to Twitter through sharing of that text message revenue.

While many of these are successful, many more are floundering with only a few followers. Twitter should sell exposure to those streams by inserting some of their tweets into a side panel on the site (or specially marked into the stream). These could be highly targeted by analyzing unique terms in the receiver's tweets. For example, if I wrote about Solar Panels three times this week I might get a preview/recommendation to check out SolarCity's twitter stream.

I think this would be relevant and add value if done correctly. What about you?

http://www.chrisknudsen.biz/622/how-twitter-could-become-a-real-business-and-why-they-wont-do-it/

Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, responded in the comments. He has blinders on. Twitter is going to die.

But beyond that, the business model of a messaging environment belongs to its users. Once we get to the post-Twitter era with a decentralized microblogging ecosystem, the business model will be the same as email : value added for the users and whatever each service providers feels like doing.

When blogging became popular, we didn't ask for a revenue model for wordpress, movabletype and the alikes. Bloggers were looking for a revenue model for themselves!

I'm afraid I can't talk more about it right now, but if you're interested, make sure to tell the Magpie your twitter name </SELF-ADVERTISING> :)

http://be-a-magpie.com

The API idea has legs, but it's too easy to search Twitter for content as it is. There are third party social media monitoring tools that can already achieve what Alan suggests for Twitter, Facebook and everything else. If Twitter closed the API to them then they'd find another way of doing it.

There is much to be said for the "freemium" model, charging either frequent Tweeters, those with many followers, or through adding some great new features like ability to see who acted on links in Tweets, get more demographic information about followers, more obvious promotion to people you don't know etc.

Whatever, they need to do it quickly before something comes along with these features incorporated.

We have taken the concept of micro-blogging and use it on our site for users to "Tweet" their most urgent business needs. This goes to their contact list, but we also send it to people they don't know who we think have solutions. It's proved to be a valuable way to broker new business introductions.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

I find it not very compelling when a company thinks that they are the smartest guys in the room.

If they did find a revenue model would they share the revenue with the twitter "Community" members that created the content and actions that bring value ?

I think that if twitter were open source more than likely someone in the "Community" would have found a revenue model.

We have integrated Lanconia into the Open Source Social Application that we are building.

We have created a non intrusive revenue model that adds value to users not just to the app.

My suggestion (FWIW) is that if you post less than (say) 30 times per month it stays free but over that you pay (say) five bucks per month. If you are a mega-poster that would rise to twenty bucks a month for over - say - 250 posts per month. The model is from Libsyn - it works for them, and me, and I think it would work for Twitter.

If they get people dropping off then so be it. It's a great service. Let's make it pay.

www.twitter.com/A_F

1. Create an enterprise SaaS service, similar to Yammer. One in which companies and organizations can use a private version for internal use, for a monthly fee.

2. Custom Branded Pages for discussions. For example, http://election.twitter.com. Imagine this for something like a TV Show, so fans can discuss while it is on. So, you would have something like http://30rock.twitter.com. Again, this could be a paid service or possible even a display advertising revenue share.

Twitter will introduce ads, its that simple. It then turns into a business model of "How many people are we going to piss off once we do it?".

The easy and quick answer is; do not force feed ads inside Tweets. Even if you make someone pay for a non-ad account, I think that idea will flop.

I think they should make the profile pages more interactive, see www.twitwall.com. Then I think they should allow advertisers to target specific demographics like we have done at www.twittad.com.

Combining that model along with them doing something like Adjix, where that is the only tiny URL service they allow on their site, this will be the future of Twitter.

Both ideas I have presented provide a revenue sharing model with the users of Twitter. And will immediately give them street credibility with millions of more potential users.

Regards,
James Eliason
President/CEO Twittad.com

I give you six months and your company will be dead.

Funny you say that because if the handful of 3rd party applications that are attempting to build and show Twitter how they can make money form together...pretty sure that wouldn't be considered "dead" at all.

"...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.

Now you might think that this would lead to spam and this is a legitimate concern. But what if object owners needed to sign-up for a different type of account to do object-tweets and risked getting their normal accounts deleted if they used them for object-tweeting, a.k.a spamming? This way, an object-tweet account is obvious to all users as such and only those who wish to follow that object will add it as a friend - or whatever the equivalent term is in Twitter parlance.

So on to the money. 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. "

On the web, posted semantically targeted ads in the middle of a page of tweets, max one per page, clearly note them as ads. It should be no worse than the ads in Facebook's News Feed, which are noticeable and often relevant.

Then, do SMS ads appended to mobile tweets.

Craig
www.budgetpulse.com

Charge companies to use twitter as a way to inform consumers.

It's more engaging than ads and a viable revenue model for twitter.

Why?

- Companies can provide MORE information, MORE often, which is relevant and engaging to their target market.

- It doesn't feel like an ad, but rather a real living and thinking person on the other end. People WANT this information.

- People CHOOSE to follow companies. So exposure to these updates are completely optional.

My hunch is that the companies, which are able to get a ROI using this model, are the companies that twitter users are dying to here from.

In addition to ‘Reply’ and ‘Star’, add a third button ‘Action’. When a user click on this button, Twitter (or your micro-feed reader, both are possible) semantically parse the tweet (it could be instant, but might be batched earlier to go faster) and figures out what action could be taken from that information:

- if my friend says “is so excited to go to Madonna's concert”, one could be sent to a ticket-agency on the one-click for the next, closest Madonna concert (need to have my location);

- if she says “knee deep in water; DSL modem dead: anyone knows a good plumber in Atlanta?”, let's be forwarded to LinkedIn search for plumber in Atlanta whom I can trust, and recommend him to her;

- if Guy Kawasaki says “Last episode of ‘The Unit’ was

Let us call these spaces what they are --- markets. In the old days, the owners of the weekly farmer market charged farmers and crafts people for stalls. Why not now, in modern Web2.0 Market places? Now there is a venerable business model.

I'd pay for my Twitter stall because it makes me money!

By focused, look at keyword search -- its maybe 2% of all US pageviews but 42% of all US internet advertising revenues. That's the kind of ratio Twitter should keep in mind. 98% of Twitter activity is not monetizable. Twitter will be able to make a ton if they can siphon off 2% of their activity into focused, e-commerce pages like keyword search and classifieds. Some ideas for focusing:

- any search or rss feed should be examined for e-commerce possibilities. If you have someone searching for "ping pong players," make damn sure you show them some online ping pong stores.

- open a Twitter classified section, and make it a permanent link. Kind of a Craigslist within Twitter.

OK, well if Twitter is not doing either of those two yet, call me after they do the obvious. Remember, keyword search and classifieds are the only two areas on the internet where advertising works.

This will be a challenge!

2. Professional API for analytics:
Those advertisers could use a paid API to select the person they want to assign there design to, depending on traffic, number of posts, etc.
Users who want to monetize, could also search for sponsors.

Users would not be only the targets in the game, but also players.. Might be funny ;)

I also like the idea of private version for internal uses

In my opinion using the global scale, be everything for everyone does not generate much money.

1. Should not contain the word CHARGE. The moment that Twitter begins charging people to use it, Twitter will die a fast death. Someone else will popup with a business model that keeps it free.

2. The business model cannot take away anything that it has already provided for free. For example, the API and public stream. Both of these being free and available have contributed to the growth of Twitter. Put these behind a wall or charge for their use, there's that word again, and there will be an uprising. If they want to go the data approach, they will have to provide something of value that isn't already available.

This is a difficult task, especially because of the tactics Twitter used to foster the initial growth. Whatever the solution, it will have to be innovative.