Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use | Hacker News Reader

Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use

brandrepublic.com

30 pointsgibsonf130 comments

I just don't see this being embraced by more than a handful of companies. Some brands are still just trying to understand how to use this for marketing purposes. Then you have the headache of policing the personal accounts that promote brands of employers.

As much as I would like to see a unique web company succeed, this doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they (Twitter) have a solid 2009 revenue plan.

"We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts." - Biz Stone

Sounds like opting for a commercial account would bring additional features, not just require businesses to pay for what's now free.

Exactly right, maxwell. Charging certain customers more, just because of who they are, is not a great business strategy :)

I think this fear is overblown. You already see educational institutions and individuals paying different prices for box software compared to business users. Large and medium-sized businesses also probably wouldn't cheat the fee system. Again, look to boxed software: would a major company run pirated copies of Office 2007? It would be pretty easy for them to, but it's not a huge expense and if anyone found out than it would be extremely embarrassing. (It would be much easier to find out about businesses cheating with twitter just by having some superficial distinction like a badge or icon on the twitter site for paid users)

According to a recent story on venture beat, twitter has brought in $1m in revenues for Dell.[1]

So there thould be quite a margin, even when Dell's VP of communities says "If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere."

[1]: http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-dell-1-mi...

It's about time! I wonder what kind of premium services they'll start offering...perhaps some blend of analytics, Twittersheep, TweetRank and MrTweet...or perhaps even my old idea of paying people to be marketed to: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=217 (BTW, I have stopped doing that until recipients start getting paid for it).

Anyways, I'm ready to pay, where should I input my CC data @ev? ;)

Twitter is cool because you make an account and start doing whatever you want.

How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"? Will I have to pay for a commercial account if I start tweeting constantly about how much I love Apple? What if I only use Twitter to advertise my free software project?

Anyway, the article is low on details, and I just don't see this working out too well.

The way I was thinking it could work is that you end up being listed in a directory, and that you get a "Verified by Twitter" sort of label. I wouldn't be surprised if in addition to something like that, they just up and give you whatever username you want, causing all sorts of havok and things. Twitter's been good at that in the past.

> Twitter is cool because you make an account and start doing whatever you want.

Like the article on "Auto Tune" the invention is great because people started using it for something besides exactly what was intended originally.

> How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"?

Brands are the ones that paid. :-) They probably get more features for the fee?

But what about Guy Kawasaki, Mark Cuban, Seth Godin or Paul Graham? Are they brands? Their blogs and writings are about much more than what they had for breakfast.

They'll probably keep the free stuff free for anyone. But there's a lot of space for them to provide extra services to paying corporate customers.

Remember that they've likely been marinating on this idea since they started up. It's also very easy to provide more service than 140 chars.

Like a hyperlink that's separate from the tweet. Or customized tweets to different groups of followers. Or formatting.

You mean like a blog? So should Twitter strive to just replicate WordPress or Tumblr then?

For a microblog product, it's not a bad idea! A socially-networked microblog can stand to add some milliblog, possibly deciblog-style functionality for a price :-)

They'll hire a thousand low-wage, just-fired americans with PhDs (would probably be indians or chinese, a couple of years ago, no?) to read every profile daily and click a button 'mark as business' when they see fit. Like Nike, Dell, Coca-Cola or Obama...

Oh, of course they'll need to raise 10 million from VCs for that. Because you know, "real time search is da bomb, dude!"

'If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.'

This is kind of ironic. You are in internet as a company to make business, but you don't want to use paid services yourself. How do you expect companies to make money if people isn't willing to pay? What makes you think that they will pay your service, if they don't want to pay for e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Obviously Dell would be a bad example here since they sell hardware, but I think this could apply to a lot of internet companies/start ups.

The market segment for paying customers is small, largely due to little value added. Even with their set of "enhanced search/stream" tools, companies will only benefit if users are commenting on their products. That goes to say, if companies are popular, they will hear that they are popular. Little known companies will not hear valuable opinions on their products. Furthermore, analytics will be skewed since the twitter community is a particular set of people.

Also, a large question would be: Who gets to choose between personal and commercial? If I have an personal account where I talk about work, is this a commercial account? The "web evangelists", marketing, and branding "gurus" - do these guys need commercial accounts? Does the size of the company matter? C-Corp or Sole Proprietorship?

While I do want to see Twitter succeed, I feel like they have other, more appropriate alternatives that could be feasible.

This would have to be implemented in a very sophisticated way. For a start Coke is a business, but then so is a start-up with three employees - are you telling me they should pay the same?

It must be the case that Twitter will offer bells and whistles to big companies and charge for them - otherwise entrepreneurs simply won't use it to build their businesses.

Also you have to think about a company's revenue streams. A car manufacturer, which could conceivably make a sale from a click-through, stands to benefit a lot more than a publisher that gets money through ad revenue.

I can think of about a million other problems too.

This amounts to "good will" on the part of the potential customers to keep Twitter alive. I doubt we'll see any ROI calculations.

Twitter is just a feature of an information system and that feature can be implemented easily on a company by company basis and incorporated as an RSS feed or whatever.

Any other use would only be considered advertising and that is difficult to quantify and internet advertising isn't doing so well at the moment...

Product/revenue ideas for Twitter for better or worse:

* Twitter Dating

* Twitter Auctions

* Twitter Q&A (crowdsourcing answers to your questions)

* Twitter Tube (links that actually open up YouTube videos on my iPhone which are thus easily discussed)

* Twitter Quick Pix (tweet out a quick picture from my iPhone, with photobucket/tinyurl integration)

So, that opens the door to a free competitor that does not charge. The wheel turns once more...

A free competitor that doesn't charge might get the business of lots of businesses. So now you -- J Random User -- have: (1) Twitter, where all your friends are, and (2) Fritter, where lots of online marketers are. Which are you going to use? Hmmmmmm, difficult decision.

And then all the businesses on Fritter notice that no one is reading their freets (frites?), and either give up or go back to Twitter and pay the twax.

Doesn't really sound like that promising a business plan, to me.

Do you think twitter has such a huge population now that another startup along the same lines does not have a chance of succeeding ?

Not necessarily. But I don't think a startup has a chance of beating Twitter by offering free accounts to businesses. A startup might beat Twitter while happening to offer free accounts to businesses, but that's a different matter.

There has to be a very compelling reason to switch. Laconi.ca/Identi.ca might end up being somewhat successful, assuming it can survive it's growth. The win there is that businesses can start their own federated Laconi.ca instance to talk to other Laconi.cas out there.

But, there's still the problem of Twitter. There are so many Twitter based apps out there, that spread their brand which means there's about 6 gazillion sites other than blogs, and now news sources like CNN, that actually promote the use of Twitter. Twitter is big.

Twitter has a lot of mindshare (I can't believe how much I see it mentioned on TV or mainstream newspapers). However, in terms of user base they are still pretty small (6 million?). There will be more competitors, especially since making your app work with Twitter is relatively easy.

I think that the reason it's only 6 million is that everyone else is just using facebook. I use twitter/identi.ca to have conversations, ask questions, "microblog" but when my posts get pushed to facebook, my friends have no idea what I'm doing.

In other words, maybe the best way for someone to take down twitter is to create a compelling reason to not use facebook's status feature, and instead use the next new thing.

Of course, Twitter is not going to find the perfect revenue model with iteration one (and they may alienate potential customers) but at least they are getting started. I wonder if @comcastcares will have to pay.

the whole twitter phenomenon is just a circle jerk of marketers and internet "celebrities". I doubt if even 5% of their population is "real" people. And even that 5% is nothing more but fanboys who wish to be the future internet celebrities.

I don't know a single "real" person who uses it, beyond that first minute. All of them come away with "WTF is the point".

Sure twitter has marketing power, because all the bloggers have convinced themselves that this is the best thing since sliced bread. But the real world could care less.

So nobody in your group of friends or coworkers is on Twitter. And I have no idea how many of the total users of Twitter are 'real' people, but I can assure you that I use Twitter regularly to communicate with friends and coworkers and it has become my primary source for information. I usually find out about breaking news stories from real people at the scene, sometimes even before it hits TV.

Twitter can definitely be a waste of time. However, there's often some gems of information in the midst of it all.

My twitter strategy as of late has been to catch up on tweets while sitting on the toilet. The iPhone helps with this endeavor.

Also, search.twitter.com has become an essential source of information.

> catch up on tweets while sitting on the toilet.

That is my email strategy, sometimes coding too.

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