Monetizing Twitter
Here’s the deal: Twitter has posted a bunch of new job openings, four of which focus on monetization. Twitter is almost four years old, is well established in the popular consciousness, has a few zillion users, and is now thinking about monetization.
To be fair to Twitter, I’m sure they’ve been thinking about monetization for a while, but haven’t really done anything about it. In fact, lots of people have wondered if Twitter can be monetized. Nobody is going to pay to post 140 character tweets. They could toss ads on your Twitter home page — maybe a banner at the top and a smaller block in the sidebar — but whether that could pay for their expensive infrastructure is unclear. Plenty of people use adblockers and others read tweets in other ways thanks to the Twitter API.
Exacerbating things is the barrier-to-entry problem. At its heart, Twitter is not very complicated. A bunch of accounts, a bunch of short messages per account, and some code to show the right ones. That is vastly oversimplifying things; the scale issues alone are daunting. That said, if Twitter annoyed a lot of its users, a competitor could easily spring up. In fact, dozens already exist, each waiting to pounce should Twitter make any major misstep. For those wishing to join the fray, grab P2 WordPress Theme, nicknamed “Twitter in a box” and you can have your own Twitter-like site up in no time.
It will be interesting to see how Twitter finds a balance between making money and losing its user base, assuming they can. And the rest of us should be watching carefully to see what we can learn about monetizing our own sites.
Oh, and in the meantime, don’t forget to follow HostScope on Twitter.
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