The Ultimate Twitter Revenue Model | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Twitter Revenue Model

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13 pointsgetp11 comments

The Ultimate - or - The Only One We Came Up With (in 10 mins.)

So you attach contextual ads(wow. brilliant.). How does someone interact with this ad? You only have 140 chars. Not enough to create a link, and also describe the ad without consuming the entire 140. Also, people are on their cell phone, do you rely on the user having web access on their phone (that is spawn-able from a txtmsg)? Do you send them a follow-up AdTweet after every regular Tweet they receive?

Without consuming the entire 140chars. or sending a followup AdTweet, you are limited to simple branding messages like, "Drink Coke." appended to the bottom. No good.

In this incarnation, Twitter doesnt make any money because they are subjugated to the cell carriers revenue model.

Is it really possible for a website like Twitter to receive as much investment as I am sure they have without any sort of business plan in place for making money?

Can somebody literally say to an investor "Hey, we are just focusing on getting eyeballs, we will worry about how to actually make money later on" and still get money?

I'm not being sarcastic, I honestly want to know the answer to this question.

My gut says there is a HUGE difference between a private monetization strategy (one that hasn't been implemented but was part of the plan all along) and the sort of 'on the fly' kind of make-it-up-as-we-go philosophy that this article seems to think Twitter is using. I'm not sure I buy the idea that Twitter really doesn't have a plan.

evan williams made a bag of cash from blogger, then he started Obvious, which owns odeo and twitter.. also on the blogger to obvious train is jason goldman (the real guy you should be asking about strategy).. biz stone was a part of xanga before joining up with the blogger/obvious crew.

then, look at the investor group.. andreessen and conway are both investors in digg and twitter (conway is also an investor in pownce,) and as you peek around the list you'll see more familiar names in the space.

investment, as far as i can tell, seems to be more like a flock activity than a solo activity. (disclaimer: i've never pursued nor been offered investment)

all companies make it up as they go, or suffer their ignorance of changing market conditions. the old adage is that "the best laid plans don't survive contact with the enemy."

that all being said, can even this group of big names get outside money without a solid plan to make money? i have no clue!

So because the money came from within, the idea that they may not actually have a plan to make money laid out is plausible. Hmm, that is an interesting point. I'm curious to know :-)

Well, not all their money came from within, I am just saying they likely had an easier time getting money as they have a proven record of building stuff that gets bought

The same was suggested for IM clients but that never worked out so well. People don't click on ads while they are communicating.

I agree, I think the ad model is a red herring.

What might make more sense is aggregating the topics people are discussing for trend-spotting analysis.

There's a mini industry dedicated to "cool" hunting, so Twitter data might be valuable to market researchers, somehow.

Yeah, but is that really a viable revenue model?

umm, consider how much money is spent on the various stages of marketing (a lot!), truly effective tools that can improve the analytics phase of a marketing effort would definitely have a market! (methinks)

aka the best way to kill Twitter

Twitter is already breaking apart at times. This will cause breakages to be worse.

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