Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

17 pointspb3016 comments

I run http://usetrackthis.com (track your packages by Twitter direct message/email/SMS) and am looking for feedback on monetizing or improving it.

Right now all the action occurs through Twitter direct messages, so I don't have many pageviews to take advantage of. I've thought a couple strategies:

1. Deliver ads through Twitter once per user/per package/per update (how much SMS spam will users tolerate?, any ad services I could use?)

2. Develop a webpage to login and manage/view packages (Use AdSense?, make it a premium feature?, do I become yet another package tracker?)

3. Make the whole service freemium (limited number of free packages?)

Appreciate any feedback/ideas, thanks.

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Your stats are unfortunately pretty small when it comes to advertising dollars.

The fact is that Twitter doesn't lend itself to monetizing on the messages itself, and as that is how your bot operates that makes it quite difficult.

Twitter spam is pretty unwelcome in general, the "friending" (when users follow each other) is treated as a pact not to create noise. I think given time it will become more acceptable as Twitter ages and more services spring up that people want to use and need funding to survive.

I don't think Freemium will work for you, this isn't a necessary service and that's what is required for user conversion from Free to Premium.

The webpage login may work, but now you're just giving the user a specific action which means any ads you show them have a very low chance of catching their eye.

I think my suggestion is check out Magpie or something similar, and make one "broadcast" tweet rather than a DM to each user. They have to be following you to get your DMs so they have to get your tweets. That's my suggestion.

Or sell ads yourself the old fashioned way, and call them sponsors. Send 1 message a day, thanking them with a short message and a link.

Four ideas:

1. Are you getting their e-mail addresses? You could send out some kind of e-mail once a month with a summary of their packages and some ads and/or affiliate offers.

2. Since you are sending them direct messages, they must be following you. Use Magpie or some other service to just post advertisment tweets (not direct messages) to your public timeline. You get paid on a CPM basis.

3. After every nth package, send them a DM asking for a donation if they appreciated the service.

4. License your app to be the official Twitter bot of any of the package tracker services. So if someone tries to track a package on any of their sites it gives them the option to add to your twitterbot. (This one would be the hardest/most work, obviously.)

I just started using the service a couple of days ago, and I'm very impressed. Awesome work.

I can understand your problem, though. Honestly, I'm not sure that I would pay anything for it, but I'm not a business user or anything - I'm just using it as a slight convenience.

So, for me at least, there's not much value. Maybe I'd pay a one-time fee for some kind of convenience, or to stop ads. I payed $10 for the Instapaper iPhone app, but mostly as a "thanks for the awesome service" kind of thing. I could see doing something similar for this.

Having some kind of ads doesn't seem like a bad idea, and maybe they could be coupons or something? I dunno - maybe something where you got an affiliate deal? I'm not sure how much I would tolerate, but if it was good stuff, maybe a couple a week.

I'm just a joe-average-user guy, though, so I'm not sure how valuable I would be as a way to profit. If there's a way to get after business or heavy users, that might be the trick.

If it's not very expensive to run, perhaps you could open-source it or simply use it as a portfolio piece. I've done some open-source work that ended up benefiting me when I was looking for work. At the very least, that should be somewhat valuable.

Sorry I can't be much more help than that. I think it's a great little utility, but maybe this is a "feature not a product" situation. Perhaps you could try to sell it to Twitter directly...? License it to UPS for exclusive use...?

Thanks, I knew it'd be a tough one to monetize, or else I would've done something earlier. Perhaps some sort of donation nag screen on the website would increase the donation rate. It definitely doesn't take a lot of resources to run, but I just wanted to gather some feedback

maybe you could sell/license your feature to another package tracker that does make money?

You need more traffic. Who has a line on people getting shipped packages? E-commerce sites.

You could develop a plugin for zencart or any of the other major shopping cart systems that lets users plug their twitter name in to get updates. That should bring you lots of traffic. Maybe you could sell that?

That's not real money though, so i'm wondering if each titter message could have a link to more info on the package? This would go to your site, where you can run ads.

Hope that's worth something.

You have a lot of followers / are following a lot of users, so you could look into using Magpie (be-a-magpie.com) to do some ads. I think you would need to post more often to twitter.com/trackthis to really start making money from it though. It also raises the issue of advertising to your users / spamming them by requiring them to follow trackthis. Just an idea.

Awhile ago I added a thanks/pls donate direct message nag when a first-time user submits a package. The results have been pretty poor, and theres been one complaint on the Uservoice.

"Search for the woman": You know which packages they're sending, where to, and with what providers. Is there a way to help your users save money? And is there a way to make money off that, for example by reselling the shipping services via an affiliate deal like the previous poster suggested?

your best bet is to get more users, get momentum, and hopefully one of the shipping companies notices you and partners with you.

How many unique users per day do you have? The size of your service really determines the correct course.

~20 new users daily, ~40 new packages daily, ~180 unique users with stuff being tracked, ~150 updates sent out daily

Assuming you found a way to get ads out there and then got $1 eCPM for them that's still just $50/yr or so. Probably better to use this project to promote one that has a better chance of making money. IMHO.

Charge money. Market it to businesses. You're never going to get money out of something like that from advertising, so you have to go the service route.

If you charged $5/user/month, you might have a nice little supplement to your income. Depends if people find it's worth paying for. If not, you're not going to make any money out of it.

Don't bother writing code, just let them paypal you by hand and enable their account by hand.

Whatever you decide to do, I think direct message ads are a bad choice.

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