Revenue Models for Twitter

This post is dedicated to Twitter. Some may think I've lost it but most of you won't doubt my reasoning. Those who doubt should spend sometime in Twitter (It's a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers called Tweets) to understand why am I so nuts to dedicate a blog post to an entity who's existence lies in bits & bytes. For those who feel for twitter (including myself), even though it fails too often, one thing we can't deny is that it's very much intertwined into our lives.

Some of the reasons for its usual or supposedly (if I may say) failures is its funding part of it. So in this post, what I've tried is to work around on some of the possible Revenue Generation models on which Twitter may work on. Though one of my previous post was on Community-led Business Model Monetization for Twitter in Facebook but this one will delve somewhat deep. So here are my thoughts:

• Monetization through 3rd part Apps: First of all, 3rd party applications are those like Twhirl, TweetDeck etc. The realtime stream of all the messages in those apps are carried by the use HTTP to pull msgs from twitter. But twitter, since they use Jabber in the backend, can use something called XMPP). It is a push technology mostly. So instead of clients (say tweetdeck) requesting to twitter over a period of time, the messages gets pushed to the tweetdeck's server (which tweetdeck has to incorporate additionally - after that tweetdeck clients can either use XMPP or HTTP to connect to their own servers to get msgs) and user experiences a near real time (messages gets shown immediately) experience with tweetdeck. This can be a Premium Service by twitter. In fact they do it for free - ex. Gnip is using it in this way. So Twitter can charge 3rd party apps (like TweetDeck) on the 2 way model: One is the free one and the other being the paid one depending on parameters like no. of tweets per day etc. Even 2 cents will also do. (Thanks to Arun Vijayan for bringing this to notice and re-correcting this model)


• Twitter as Search Tool: Summize (Rechristened as search[dot]twitter[dot]com) can be used for the next level of Search Indexing where the USP may be “What are you Searching?” The answer lies in the conversations Tweople (people residing the Twitterland) are having. Relevancy will be based on Time Frame, No. of conversations on the specific topic, No. of users endorsing/conversing on the same topic.


• Monetizing for Corporate Clients: In the recent trend, lot of companies are following online conversations via twitter like Dell, Comcast, FireFox etc. Search[dot]Twitter[dot]Com can be used for corporate clients to refine/optimize their search regarding the conversations customers/client/partners are having about them. It's more on the online-offline service model to help them out in understanding, refining and optimizing tweople's conversations across twitterland.


• Twitter as News Aggregator: Recent developments in Twitter Blog says that "...Twitter is increasingly being described as a personal news-wire—shared world events like this morning's earthquake near Los Angeles support the definition." Users nowadays have started concentrating on the trending topics of twitter search (Summize) to get relevant news in the web and the best part is it's people shared and it comes faster than traditional news medium which makes it different & premium. So isn't this a new model of attracting users through which Twitter can earn revenues.

These are the broad guidelines in which Twitter can definitely monetize going forward in the future. So please contribute your own ideas, so that we can help OUR TWITTER!

Comments are most welcome...