For anyone that’s been stuck without Internet access for the last 6 months Twitter is a micro blogging platform that has taken the Internet by storm. It has seen unprecedented growth as people from all over the world blog what they are doing/thinking in under 140 words. It gives people the opportunity to follow friends and keep updated on what they are thinking/doing.
This YouTube clip gives a fantastic short explanation of the service.
Until now Twitter has remained pretty much 100% advertising free apart from a small link that was displayed on the site during the recent American elections. For a site that has well over 5 million registered users and growing by a stupidly fast rate each day it won’t be long before it has to introduce some kind of commercial platform so it can pay itself back. This post will look at the likely options.
On site advertising
Twitter is different to other blogging platforms in that there are a large number of third party supported applicaitons that enable you to post onto your Twitter page. This means an individual using a service may never actually see their homepage. I personally use my iPhone and Twitterific to post onto my account. The simple, clean and effective page designs of the Twitter site mean it would find it hard to insert standard advertising placements without annoying a substantial amount of users.
Chance of happening – 4/10
Paid for Tweets
Each blog on the Twitter platform is referred to as a Tweet. With people following their friends updates closely it would be very easy to insert targeted sponsorship messages to certain demographic and geographic segments. Any links inserted into the commercial messages could be easily tracked so there would be an easy way to work out return for investment for the advertisers. Twitter if they implemented this commercial platform would have to monitor it extremely tightly. Part of the reason that Twitter has taken off so much is that its been free from commercial advertising so users being flooded with messages would annoy people and there would almost certainly be a reduction in use of the service. If Twitter do implement this service I can see it being limited to very large advertising campaigns. Anyone wanting to drive users to a website for anything less than £50k (estimate) would have to look somewhere else.
Chance of happening – 8/10
Software sales
With the wide range of third party applications available on the Internet for people to update their accounts with it could be possible that Twitter would develop software and sell it to users that enabled them to perform a unique and exclusive service within their account. Twitter could expect high numbers of sales but again I believe their would be strong reaction from the Twitter community and other software developers.
Chance of happening – 5/10
Sell itself?
Some analysts and websites have placed Twitter with a market value of over $100 million. Large companies such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google I’m sure would climb walls to pick up Twitter now whilst its still growing and doesn’t have a commercial platform. Each with their own adversing platform, the Twitter community would provide a perfect opportunity to further obtain revenue from advertisers and deliver response.
Chance of happening 9/10
I’m sure within the first couple of quarters in 2009 we will hear more on how Twitter will commercialise itself and move forward. Hopefully it’ll continue to grow without too much intrusion as that’s the beauty.
You can find my Twitter page here
For more information on Twitter read this great blog by Darren Rowse the publisher of Problogger.net
