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Comment by markessien | Hacker News Reader

For such widespread adoption, that people have to continue to use it, no matter what the option is. Pay sites grow slower than free sites. Twitter has money in the bank, so it can afford to stay free for a while, thus growing. So when it's big already, it starts monetizing. If it starts monetizing too early, growth will slow.

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That's a ridiculous notion, though. If not paying for the service still allows you to do everything twitter provides save for a small subset of features, it doesn't prevent folks from joining and seeing the value of it.

Being afraid to generate revenue before hitting critical mass sets this silly precedent that you can't flip the switch until you reach a mythical number of users.

I'm not saying Twitter couldn't make a bunch of money, but for every YouTube and Twitter waiting to hit it big, there are 1000's of companies thinking this is a viable solution to their problems and failing because of it.

So the negative effect of Twitter not having a publicly announced business is felt primarily by other companies, companies that aren't able to think for themselves?

I'm not sure I buy that. There are plenty of companies, like your own, that understand what their business needs. And there are always going to be plenty of other companies that behave like sheep. If it wasn't Twitter, they'd find some other trend to misapply.

This is what LinkedIn did. It became such a valuable tool for recruiters that many are paying members.

Paying big time, too. And not just for premium memberships that allowed more InMail -- IIRC their recruiter-tailored service runs at $25K a year. I pitched hard for it when I was a recruiter, but we were stuck in the cold-calling age. I lasted about another 2 months.

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