DISQUS

Mark Schoneveld · 1 year ago

I was just thinking about how (annoying) cool it is that Twitter has such rapid adoption of avatar 'memes'. Currently, the 'manga avatar' is all the rage. I'm sure there are plenty of (suckers) people out there who would promote products with their profile...

David Mullings · 1 year ago

That is definitely an interesting business model and they should pursue that.

However, advertising is not the obvious business model. Today I posted at FastCompany (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/david-mullings/...) that they have 3 better options:

(1) Offer Users Value-added Services - Worpress already does this and the model is easy to adapt. Their blog software is free but you can purchase add-ons. I am sure that Twitter can come up with value-added services users will want.

(2) Charge marketers/brands/advertisers to use Twitter - I pay a monthly fee to manage my email list through a provider (most programs charge per user or by the quantity of messages). Zappos uses Twitter, see Inc. magazine's Zappos Finds a Use for Twitter. Really!, and many other companies use Twitter to quickly communicate with their biggest fans. I even use Twitter for Realvibez, tweeting about new videos uploaded to the site, news and blog posts. I would gladly pay a fee to be able to get valuable insight information on my tweets - how many read and so forth - plus be able to use such a great communications channel.

(3) Focus groups - I have seen Twitter used for focus group research and would gladly pay
Twitter to manage such a focus group for me. I will provide the
question and the account to tweet a reply to, Twitter can choose who to
send it to based on profile information.

stacieadams · 1 year ago

I like the meebo model and think it will work well for twitter too.

Ad sales are falling but here's one way to insure someone will buy the ads: Let it stay adult-friendly and allow profiles to be marked as mature. A new site called adulttwitter.com shows more than 100 profiles already exist of stars and marketing people in adult entertainment. Once the rest of the pornstars and webcam performers realize what a great tool it is for keeping their fans up to date via their mobile phones (posting to myspace, facebook and twitter, all with one txt msg), many more stars will sign up. Then they will be able to run porn ads on those profiles. Even with the economy in trouble, people will always be looking for porn.

AndyFinkle · 1 year ago

I spent about 10 minutes thinking about it and came up with many ways Twitter can monetize.

Racing School · 1 year ago

Meebo has got a huge head start over Twitter. I just can't see them catching up.