Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models
By Steve Poland • March 29, 2007
With Twitter’s recent API addition, there is potential for many new applications to be built off the Twitter back-end (although, not quite yet). Twitter usernames are essentially keywords used for these applications built on the Twitter platform — and Twitter username squatting is happening. The question is, how will these new businesses monetize — and how will Twitter itself monetize:
The power in any advertising-supported website, publication, TV show, etc, is community (readers, viewers, listeners, etc). Build a great service, get people to use it (or read, listen, view) and you can then send out specific ads to those users. Example 1: Have a Twitter username for “Knicks” (i.e. NY Knicks, a basketball team in the NBA). People add that user as their friend — the “Knicks” username pushes out any Knicks news… the minute it happens! Ditto on sports scores — if a Knicks game is going on, it’ll send out the score during the game to keep you alerted, if you want to be. If you can get 10,000 Knicks fans on your list — then you can either:
1) Put an ad in any blank space at the end of your 140-character messages — i.e. “Drink an ice cold, refreshing Pepsi.”
2) Send out an advertisement every 10th or 50th (whatever you learn to be OK with your users) twitter. Thus, I may receive 10 twitters of news announcements, and the 11th is an advertisement for Grey Goose vodka.
Next options…
3) Pay-Per-Twitter Message — If there was a username called “NYCtechJobs” — any person looking for a tech job in NYC could be a friend of this list, and be notified instantly of any new NYC tech jobs. Where would those jobs come from? Initially possibly just from Craigs List, Monster, Hot Jobs, etc … but then say you have 2,000 users that are the friends of “NYCtechJobs”, that means you have 2,000 prospective tech employees in the NYC area. A company would love to get their latest tech job out to those prospects, so they can find a hire — thus, they go to a web page you have setup, and they are able to create a message up to 140 characters (likely include a URL to full job details) with some details on the job. You can charge the employer for posting this.
Ditto with a list (er, username) like “NYCfurniture”. People could pay to broadcast their message to all of the friends of “NYCfurniture”.
4) Charge for access to your Twitter messages — Your username can be private and only your friends can receive/view your twitters. Thus, if you had valuable/timely information — you could have a subscription-based service where you charge $X for people to be your friend, and then they would have access to your twitters. Thus, a celebrity could charge for this — or a newspaper might do this to give you access to the news first — or some blogger that finds online shopping deals could send them to you … basically, if the user wanted to be “in the know” for whatever offering, they’d pay $X for access (per week or month). Note: You’d have to verify their subscriptions — and if they haven’t paid for the month, you’d remove them as a friend from your Twitter account.
5) Commissions on user purchases — Setup a service that allows users to buy products through this. User would need to setup an account with you with their credit card (or PayPal info, or a deposit into this proposed payment service) stored. I imagine a user could be browsing Wired magazine and be able to quickly purchase a subscription for $10 by ripping out their cell phone, Twittering a code like “d buy wired”, with a confirmation coming back to the user and them approving the confirmation possibly using a password, then the transaction occurring.
The biggest question on everyone’s minds is what Evan Williams is thinking. They’re opening up their back-end to allow the development of applications on the Twitter platform (which I think is real smart, because people are going to build useful applications for Twitter users — and everyone will be using Twitter in some capacity more often) … but will Evan plan to charge these companies that are building apps? Will Evan not want these apps monetizing themselves? How is Evan planning to monetize Twitter — or will he sell and leave that to a Yahoo/Microsoft/News Corp to figure out how to extract value out of the massive userbase (like his sale of Blogger to Google)? I don’t think Evan knows the answers quite yet — he’s just focused on building a great application for users.
You can follow me at twitter.com/techquilashots.
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22 Responses to “Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models”
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You’ve got some great ideas here steve. One thing I realized with my website is that it’s better to build a good site and get a userbase, rather than try and squeeze every 10 cents you can out of AdSense. Once Twitter hits the MySpace crowd, it will be much more marketable.
Anyways, am I the only one that thinks Twitter is painfully slow? Your little widget on your blog takes forever to load, and whenever I try to go to a Twitter page, it takes quite a while. What’s going to happen when they have 10x as many users?
@Chris — they are working to scale the service.
Maybe it’s just because I don’t ever text message - I don’t even have a plan that offers it (meaning I pay $0.10 per message), but I can’t think of a single thing I would be interested in getting sent to my phone.
If I want the news I’ll just hop online and I think that’s how the majority of users are. I think the market for a group of users that have no access except for their phone is very slim. Those users that are on the road all the time already have a solution for this problem anyways - data packages with their Blackberry.
I don’t know how effective it might be, but Twitter could definitely be used for “Punch the Monkey” types of promos. For example, if you were at a sporting event, a company like Pizza Hut could put an ad up on the scoreboard for a few minutes at half time saying, “The first 100 people to send a text message to “d pizzahut (your email) will receive an emailed coupon for $10 off their next order.” Interactive advertising/marketing can best be done by SMS/Twit because it is (1) mobile and (2) simple. So, instead of “40404 starbucks” to get a location, it could be a billboard saying “$1 off a latte if you send your email to ‘d starbucks’ on Twitter. Exit now to use your coupon!” Great for tracking marketing and giving something back to the customer of near-term use.
First off, keep up the posts on Twitter.. I love em! How about daily horoscopes? Yes, I’ve got the horoscopes name on Twitter
[…] Techquila Shots » Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models (tags: business advertising ideas) […]
Brilliant, Collin! I’ve covered boldlygoing and myself (jameskirk) as far as twitter names go. And I’m really not in the least bit concerned about this technology otherwise, however, now you’re talking about how I can get a Grande Cap low foam for a buck off, RIGHT NOW. Count me in!
Funny, I was going to take horoscopes. Maybe I’ll see if ‘horoscopea’ is available…Twitter Squatting!
i do not understand the big hype over twitter. maybe im slow. it seems to me that twitter is just a glorified away message that has been a part of IM for a while. Couldn’t you do the exact same thing with your IM away message as you do with twitter? Couldn’t yahoo, msoft, aol, gtalk add this functionality pretty easy to their existing clients? educate me on what im missing..
Kevin, if you want to buy “horoscopes” from me, let me know.. I’ll sell it to ya for $100,000
It is easy to see how excited you are about twitter. I’m curious though, how is this different from IM Bots? And everyone already uses IM. Why didn’t that concept ever take off?
[…] Techquila Shots » Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models More talk about possbile Twitter monetization models (tags: twitter) […]
speaking of monetization ideas using SMS…have you seen this? ...
Ok, I’ve set up a bot that will deliver horoscopes daily to your twitter account… check it out!
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@marc - Wow, that is genius. What country is this being done in? I see a 5-digit shortcode, so assuming USA? I’d think there are legality issues — such as the ability to enter the sweepstakes without a fee.
OK, how about rentals that delivers new apartment listings to your cell the moment they come on the market with a number to scoop them up. I have rentals, sfrentals, larentals–anyone want to help?
@IM people — Yes, there is an IM component to this. But the big point is the mobility. With this, it’s easy to pull out your phone and send a text message to ‘pull’ information. Yes, people are using the service on the web/online — but the mobility — the offline component — is what’s going to exciting to watch.
How’s this for a twitter name: adgj
Why? I’ll give you a hint: the ‘@’ key on my phone is shift + 1
@Steve
In reference to the test-message sweepstakes online - these are done in the US. Watch SpikeTV around 10PM PST and there is an hour long show featuring these simple questions. You can either text message in or enter online.
They really are a great way to make money - easy questions mean more people text in. You text in to enter, they send a message back asking if you really want to enter, you respond with Yes, and then if you are selected they call you. Once they get X amount of people on the phone they pick one at random and tell the rest, “You were so close - try again!” You can usually enter 10 times per question with about 10 questions per hour.
If you enter online it’s free - which is how I think they get around the legality issues.
Brilliant. I must admit that for the first time I can see what the very point of this service can be.
I don’t know anything about Twitter yet. Thanks for the info.
This is a very creative way to make money online, I haven’t tried it yet. For me, I make most of my money from Affiliate Programs and PPC programs like Google Adsense.
Another thing, thenewsroom.com is a good way to make money too, show video and get money. Cool!
Have a nice day, guys!