A per follower charge is a fast way to obliterate the value of Twitter as a platform. However, if any of you think that Twitter hasn't already defined and begun executing upon their monetization strategy, you are woefully naive. ;)
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:29 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <zzn...@gmail.com>wrote: > > On Jul 16, 1:14 pm, Stuart <stut...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Twitter have a business plan, we're just not worthy enough to know all > > the details. What we know so far is that they're planning to launch a > > premium account type with a bunch of tools to aid brand and engagement > > tracking. > > I've got news for you ... Twitter itself is woefully behind the curve > on monitoring / marketing / analytics technologies. Third parties are > springing up daily with offerings in this area, many of them involving > cutting-edge natural language processing. Twitter could obviously > invest in these areas, but I'm not sure why they would, rather than > focusing on stability, scalability and security of the underlying > platform and messaging systems. > > Perhaps one way to "monetize" Twitter would be to implement a per- > follower charge, say, free up to 2000 followers, then a small monthly > fee up to 10,000, a larger fee up to 100,000 and so on. I haven't seen > follower count distribution data recently, but I'd say that people > with more than 2000 followers are rare and are probably using Twitter > as a "push marketing / sales" platform in some sense. Of course, I'm > at around 3500 followers at the moment, so I would be paying a monthly > fee and would need to justify it as a business expense (or block about > 1500 people, which isn't out of the question) ;-) > -- Kevin Mesiab CEO, Mesiab Labs L.L.C. http://twitter.com/kmesiab http://mesiablabs.com http://retweet.com
