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Comment by josep2 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is by far the #1 service I use everyday. It's been the most valuable to me from a networking perspective where I've made friends and professional connections. I also happen to be a shareholder. It's been disappointing to watch Twitter try to become a business and completely falling flat.

The acquisition of Vine and Periscope haven't led to much and the user growth from Live video is still t be seen.

The product is immensely complicated compared to something like Instagram or Snapchat. It manages to be everything and nothing at the same time. I've been a fan of Jack Dorsey's work at Square but monetization is a complete different animal in that industry.

To summarize I just don't know what the future of Twitter as a business will hold but I guess I'm here for the ride.

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> It manages to be everything and nothing at the same time

True.

To me it is mostly a pre-filtered news website. I follow people who talk about stuff that I'm currently intersted in.

But it seems many people using it diffrently.

Some people use it to update their customers. Some to force their political agenda onto the world.

I use it as a news site as well, and to resolve customer support issues. On that topic, it's simply amazing how much more responsive a company is if you contact them about a an issue on twitter than in any other form of communication.

I believe twitter should segment and provide platforms for specific types of users.

Twitter needs to find a frictionless way to get paid by their regular users that most users won't notice or think much about. Several potentials exist: can charge to follow additional users above a certain threshold; can charge to expand publishing platform (i.e., to be followed by more than a certain quantity of users); can have "premium channel"-style users that only paid members can follow (this may also be a way to allow publishers to monetize; set your feed "paid follower only" and split the revenue with Twitter), and so forth.

The FREE! model only works out when you can sell your users' attention. Twitter has proven that it can't do that -- for whatever reason, user attention on Twitter is not worth what it's worth on Facebook or Google and they can't make a profit from it. So they need another way to monetize, and IMO that should be the tried and true "make people pay for what they use".

Paying in order to increase the maximum count of followers sounds really bad, given that those are the users that also generate content and hence the reason for why you also have lurkers with under 100 followers that just consume content.

Your proposal is a terrible idea, because Twitter should be paying those that genuinely attract an audience, not vice versa, since those people can always switch. Popular people will be popular anywhere. E.g. Linus Tolvards has a big and active audience on Google+, even though it is in general a ghost town.

I imagine that they will try to leveraging/monetizing the influencer marketing trend more.

Essentially a company / influencer marketplace.

They are the ones with the perfect data insight.

This combined w/ a "show ad to people who follow person N (and alike) might be a very strong ad format only they (and instagram, snapchat) can provide

Advertising is a great model.

Twitter's problem is that their ads don't work very well (compared to Google and FB), and their audience isn't growing.

Both of these things are solvable.

It isn't at all clear why people think there needs to be a new model. Advertising has worked well for hundreds of years (newspapers/radio/tv/internet) but it needs an audience. Twitter nearly has this.

My preferred approach would be something like reddit gold; encourage the followers to pay for benefits for those accounts they particularly value.

Actually monetising a twitter account directly is a risky business, as it could easily drive down quality.

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