from Hacker News

A Non-Sucky Twitter Business Model

by jgilliam on 3/21/11, 3:40 AM with 8 comments

• by jarin on 3/21/11, 4:25 AM

  That seems awfully counterproductive, and it would take about 30 minutes for someone to start republishing paid users' content.

  Here are some ideas that I think would work way better:

  - In-stream advertising (ala Twitteriffic)

  - Charge a couple of bucks for mobile apps (or mobile app API access)

  - Charge for premium, business-oriented features (multi-user accounts, autofollow, analytics, ability to receive DMs without following someone, custom CSS on profile page)

  - Charge to vote on American Idol via Twitter

• by flyosity on 3/21/11, 4:19 AM

  It's a good idea, but only if the account is posting information that's worth the fee. Like the author says: MP3 downloads, exclusives, behind-the-scenes stuff will be great for bands, but I think for non-celebrity accounts it might be tougher to come up with valuable information. For retailers, coupons are obviously the way to go, but I'm having trouble coming up with lots of other good content examples.

• by Skywing on 3/21/11, 4:56 AM

  You'd have to be prepared for Twitter to become the Apple App Store - there would be 2 of everything. "FooAccount" and "FooAccount (FREE)", for example. The free ones would just advertise content visible from their paid one.

• by blhack on 3/21/11, 5:55 AM

  What about something like viglinks? Turn every bare outbound link from twitter.com into an affiliated link, turn every link from t.co into an affiliated link, etc.

  Yes, people will be able to avoid this by using shorteners other than t.co, or by using a third party client, but if what twitter is saying is correct (the majority of users use the official client or use twitter.com), then this shouldn't be a problem at all.

  Are they already doing this? It seems incredibly obvious, it's totally transparent to the users (I don't imagine that any of the users would be against this), everybody wins.

• by gersh on 3/21/11, 6:42 AM

  How about charging for longer tweets, or let you make your tweets have a larger font for a fee.

• by phlux on 3/21/11, 5:59 AM

  I really think this is a great idea - and would work well along with the following:

  I recently went through several rounds of interviewing at twitter (didnt get it) - but had I got it, I was planning on submitting the following as a model suggestion:

  Twitter has proven itself as a very valuable communications/pr channel for a vast number of celebrities, news sources and brands.

  Twitter should provide a more broad content platform to the critical mass of influential people, sources and brands by allowing for larger content to be hosted on Twitter.com itself.

  Effectively visualized as a slide-to-the-right "extended content" panel that would allow celebrities, as an example, to have exclusive content and articles hosted that are directly accessible from twitter, and the twitter client etc...

  You would continue to have your regular succinct content flow - but you can drive traffic to deeper-dives on your expanded panel (It effectively allows for full-length content to be hosted in-line.

  This can be monetized by twitter in a rev sharing manner such as you suggest.

  If you searched for something, you could be driven to the extended content pages and then be shown the contextual stream of tweets that apply to that content as well.

  Twitter has two options; find a way to properly monetize the message format they have, or modify their offering. There could be a good hybrid as well in this approach.