DIGITCOOL

Making Cash From a Bird

Making Cash From a Bird: Twitter Revenue Model

I think their considered (or delayed…) approach to making cash is at worst, interesting and at best, incredibly wise.

They have their funding, they are mapping their run rate VERY carefully and they have a whole load of options.

My interest around the whole ‘Twitter making money’ saga doesn’t centre around the company itself  but more around the countless journo’s, bloggers and so-called ‘industry experts’ who have been speculating, in my opinion wrongly, about how this rising star of new media will make its billions.

So many who should know better have gone away and written poxy attempts at modelling revenue based on a display ad model - Whether they talk about indescriminate banners, buttons and MPU’s or ‘contextually relevant’ PPC ads placed in and around tweets.

The models around paid subscriptions are even worse - This is all SO WRONG.

Twitter needs to play to its strengths - Users like the service because it is free and doesn’t carry any ‘clutter’… no ads confounding you into accidentally clicking or encroaching on your privacy by seemingly ‘reading’ your tweets and marketing accordingly.

Twitter does not offer a new platform which creatives can use to pioneer exciting brand campaigns, actually quite the opposite - Twitter uses a simple user interface to enable and encourage short (and often opinionated) comments, conversations and information exchanges.

Ultimately, the service carries massive amounts of real-time data, which if put into context, can be invaluable in providing research in the form of customer feedback, user reviews, word of mouth spreading (+ve/-ve) and much more.

The real value Twitter has to offer brands and agencies and therefore where it would make most money in the shortest possible time is strongly centered around providing timely insight on any given subject - I am well aware that there are 3rd party tracking services which you can set to monitor certain key words and similar but what I am talking about is a Twitter-built dashboard enabling the simple monitoring of words and trends with the ability to drill into more complex detail at the click of a button.

Think about mapping +ve/-ve user commentary against their twitter ranking (those with more followers being more powerful), assessing the value of a tweet to a user (the more frequently a user tweets, the more diluted each tweet becomes) and perhaps most importantly, being able to apportion location to a conversation - It’s great that people are talking about your product positively, but if they are all in NYC and you’re launching in London then perhaps you should reasses your strategy… see where I’m going with all this?

Once you have isolated the users you want to target based on their tweets/followers/locations, there is then a value in using display/direct marketing opportunities to communicate with them - But ONLY once you have assessed the data first.

There are clear signs that research and insight tools are becoming more crucial to the way agencies and their clients conduct their campaigns and that means more money for companies providing these services - Sir Martin Sorrrell’s recent $25M investment into Omniture stands as testament to this trend.

So, let’s stop all this silly talk about banners, buttons, text links and alike - The display model was nowhere near perfect to start with, why impose a legacy concept onto an emerging platform when you could totally revoloutionise the way brands view the value of a conversation.

Rory Sutherland talks very highly of an innovative service called Fizzback, I say Twitter is already carrying the information marketers so desperately seek, they are merely lacking the tools to collate and interpret.

Twitter, go forth and innovate.

Onwards and upwards.