Pallian Creative

Monetizing Twitter

There’s been a lot of chatter recently on how twitter can monetize. Comments range from inserting text link ads between tweets to charging companies who use it for marketing purposes - but, I don’t believe twitter will actually implement any of these. Twitter is smart enough to recognize that pursuing traditional advertising models will not work with it’s 140 characters or less attention span users. And with over $35 million in venture capital money, twitter is not really in any hurry to start monetizing either.

But say, they were to begin monetizing today, here are three possible scenarios I believe will work best for them and the community in general:

1. Twitter Search Analytics - currently, twitter search is one of the most useful and powerful sites out there. My startup Tweetizen actually uses the twitter search extensively to help create and embed groups, and we have some great analytics in place to keep track of demographics. Similarly, if Twitter is keeping track of it’s search analytics, they can potentially sell this information to large corporations who’re actively looking to market to the twitter generation. When I mean analytics, I’m talking age and demographics - not actual tweets. As an advertising corporation, I wouldn’t mind paying for this data since it helps target future ads campaigns.

2. Sponsored Groups on Twitter - Twitter currently does not have any grouping capabilities (another reason why i started Tweetizen). But say they did have it, then similar to facebook, Twitter can charge corporations to create specialized groups and sub-groups to manage outgoing tweets. For example, say I was Pepsi Corp, by sponsoring a group on twitter, I get to create sub-groups where I can send out different tweets to target different audiences in different subgroups - and not just be limited to sending the 1 universal tweet.

3. Charge API developers for unlimited API calls and increasing the 140 character limit on the search - working first hand on Tweetizen, I know the limitations twitter has put on us 3rd party developers. For example, currently we can only have a 100 requests/hour; so if you were a power twitter user, you can only tweet or receive a 100 tweets per hour. This fills up pretty quickly if you have thousands of friends and followers and use a 3rd party app like Tweetizen or Tweetdeck.

Another limitation we have is the 140 character limit on twitter search. For example, if you tried creating a group based on interests on Tweetizen, your tags should have less than 140 characters combined. So if you were to create a group called Gary Vaynerchuk, with tags such as wine library, wine tv, gary vaynerchuk and @garyvee, you’re already almost out of characters. This can be easily fixed if twitter removes the 140 character limitation on search queries. I understand they put these limitations to save bandwidth, but if 3rd party developers are profitable, I don’t see why they wouldn’t mind paying for these unlimited services. I know, as the owner of Tweetizen, that we’ll be more than happy to pay twitter for unlimited api calls and unrestricted character limits as it only improves our services for our users.

Let’s hear some of your ideas on how twitter can monetize - here’s @garyvee’s take on it: