Twitter Japan Will Allow Users to Charge for Access to Their Tweets
Twitter's Japanese partner, Digital Garage, will soon introduce a micropayment system that will give Twitter users the option to charge for access to their tweets. According to Media magazine, users will be able hide access to images, external URLs and text behind a paywall and other users would only be able to see this content if they either paid for a monthly subscription or through a pay-per-tweet option. Twitter itself will take a 30% cut.
Kenichi Sugi, the COO of Digital Garage Mobile, announced this new business model at mobidec2009 earlier this week. The paid accounts will go live in January 2010.
Twitter's Japanese subsidiary has always been somewhat different from Twitter's main site. Twitter Japan already offers advertising options, for example. Japan is also the only market where Twitter offers its own mobile application and mobile video service.
Don't Pay for Twitter - Pay for Accessing Tweets
According to today's reports, which still lack a lot of detail, Twitter users will have a number of options to pay for these account. According to Media magazine's Anita Davis, users can pay monthly subscriptions with their credit cards and the pay-per-tweet options could be "charged to credit card, convenience store top-up cards or carrier billing for Twitter-on-mobile users."
Overall, this looks like an interesting business model for the Japanese market. Instead of charging its users directly for the use of Twitter, this option gives content producers the option to charge for their work. This new payment system will also give news organizations the option to experiment with delivering paid news, for examples..
Would You Pay To Access Premium Tweets?
In the rest of the world, however, Twitter is more likely to make money through charging for premium accounts that add new features (analytics, verified accounts, etc.).
Image credit: itmedia.co.jp
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It's an interesting model, and the idea of getting paid directly for content is pretty attractive. But, from the consumer side, I think it will get expensive fast if I have to subscribe to each person I want to follow. Also, there's huge potential for misrepresenting what's behind the paywall in order to get users to click through.
I sure hope this new trend does not catch on over here!
I don't know what will happen in Japan but in the West that idea has no legs.
Spammers are incredibly skillful in the art of misrepresenting and I'm sure they would find a way to get people to pay them to get their adverts.
Most probably that's what will happen in Japan.
It's definitely something to watch. What if your favorite band could use it to release special editions of tracks or first looks at their new EP at a discount?
It would offer incentive for users to follow the group on twitter. Permission marketing at its finest?
Keep an eye on this one.
Very interesting article. i remember Bloghology Network predicted that Twitter will look into ways for monetization.. thumbs up for the article :-)
The "pay per tweet" model is worrisome, given the likelihood of reducing those Twitter feeds to "breaking news" of some sort and killing any possibility of personal flavor or conversation, which is one of the main attractions.
The one area where this might work is breaking, highly segmented, insider information... sort of the micro-newsletter.
If someone can just copypaste the tweet, well, that's retarded.
Article needs an update above the first graph: TechCrunch reports that this pay-to-view plan is NOT going forward; links to company press release.
TechCrunch now says this won’t happen.
But to commemorate the fact that Twitter is NOT going to charge it’s users I have created a Twitter mockup that implements the exact functionality TechCrunch has described. It sells fake Robert Scoble SuperTweets. Have a look here:
http://www.icents.net/demo/faketwitter.html
SuperTweets are tweets up to 420 characters. The mockup charges 1 cent micropayments to show each SuperTweet, and it charges 30 cents micro-subscription to show all of them.
I don’t know if this would work or not if Twitter implemented it, but TC seems to think it might, since this mockup follows exactly the functionality described here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/27/6-reasons-why-twitter-japans-subscription-model-might-work-in-japan
What do you think??
Who's tweets would you pay for?