Twitter Actually Trying To Make Money?
Of the big names in social networking (including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo) none have had more of a boom in the last couple of years than Twitter which are now the third biggest with over 55 million visits a month. But good as this success has been for the company they haven’t been able to make massive profits as the service is free, until now.
There have been mutters of a profit making scheme for Twitter for a while but we weren’t expecting to see it until next year, but giving the economic climate it comes as no surprise that they have brought their plans forward and are hoping to implement them ASAP.
For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter – a brief overview: it is a social networking site on which you leave ‘tweets’ (messages of under 140 words) that give a brief insight into your little world. This has proved incredibly popular, and over 4 million people go on regularly to update their twitter page and tell people what they are doing.
But as with all social networking sites there is always the threat that they will start making people pay for using the website and this fire was fanned when stories of Twitter’s money making schemes arose, but fortunately that day has not come yet.
They aim to generate revenue by creating special ‘business’ accounts which will allow unique features which would be desirable for a business to have. Unfortunately we have absolutely no idea what these ‘features’ could be, but the combination off a massive audience and a trusted website in Twitter could be very attractive for businesses.
Twitter would then charge them for the accounts, and thus generate some money. Although I’d love to think that this will be pumped back into more features for the average free user I doubt it; but it will probably make Twitter think twice before doing anything that could be unpopular…
Via – Reuters
Related Pages:
- Twitter Paid-For Business Account Benefits Coming In 2010
- Twitter’s Verified Accounts For Famous Celebrities
- Twitter, Welcome to the Mainstream! Just Don’t Drown!
- Money Listers – Learn How to Make Money Online!
- What Is The Point Of Twitter?
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Comments: 1
5:25 pm 28th February, 2010
Well, so far Twitter managed to break even in 2009 solely by closing search deals with Google and Microsoft. When you perform a search on a specific term now you can see tweets that are being made about the topic in real time in the search results.
That won’t help Twitter as a sustainable source of revenue though. The idea to introduce “premium business accounts” does sound interesting as many businesses would pay a lot of money to be able to target users with advertise based upon the location they tweet from and the topics they talk about. The first step will probably have nothing to do with targeted advertise though; they’ll just offer more possibilities for companies trying to establish a brand I think.
It is doubtful that Twitter will manage to strike it “rich” with this type of service though. The true source of revenue that Twitter is going to tap into in the long run will be selling targeted traffic to advertisers.