Twitter-Japan

Alley Insider recently held a contest to create Twitter’s Revenue Model, with the aim of helping Twitter find a revenue system and actually start making money. The contest was well received and the winner was announced, an ad agency. Here’s the winning group’s slide presentation:

Twitter Contest-Denuology Entry94 Update

Basically, their plan is to sell data and charge for access to users who can opt-in to do surveys and give feedback to companies. There are some reasons why it might not work as well as planned:

  1. Twitter might not be mainstream (or diverse) enough to give brands enough of the specific customer profile.
  2. The recruitment of users and the facilitation of conversation can be done without paying Twitter to set up a business account. This can be done right now using Twitter’s free account offering and specific data derived through the API. So why would businesses pay $10,000 to get a premium account set up?

It does seem like it would work but it doesn’t appear to be truly a long-term monetization plan for Twitter, especially one that really involves ALL users (like display ads. See the screenshot above of Twitter Japan)… and not just the ones who opt-in to get surveyed by companies. I also think that selling only to brands that need marketing data is a limited view of Twitter’s monetization potential but it can be a useful supplement or part of a more well-rounded plan.

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More articles about Twitter:

  1. Twitter May Start Charging Brands for Commercial Accounts
  2. Twitter to Make Money from Tools and Not Ads
  3. Threadless Sells Twitter T-Shirts, Offers Cash Prizes
  4. Refollow Helps You Bulk Manage Your Twitter Network

Filed under: Monetizing Twitter • News about Twitter