Twitter – Monetize or Die

Biz Stone announced for Reuters that Twitter is not considering adopting an advertiser-funded approach, however, the microblogging platform is now developing a set of tools that will eventually generate revenue.

It was about time for Twitter to consider a monetization model – and although the Twitter community is not fond of ads, Twitter doesn’t have any other chance to attract paying customers in my view. Twitter is already extensively used by marketers who try to build up communities of “followers” and bombard these with links to their latest product offerings. Even the so called Twitter gurus spam the network with links to products they sell, webinars and ebooks that apparently will teach people how to use Twitter to “maximize profits” for a fee.

Due to its amazing viral nature Twitter is open to abuse. Many will argue that if you don’t like the updates of a fellow tweep you can just “unfollw.” And so begins the follow – unfollow dance, one that costs time and energy and it is pretty frustrating for those who use Twitter for fun.

Probably Twitter will monetize by including “analytics” that will show pro users how many times their links were clicked, what were the most popular terms and trends, and so on. This, however, is a slippery-slope: everything related to lightweight twitter analytics has already been created and it is free, online. Who would pay for “lightweight” analytics anyway? The professional SEM/SEO already uses other tools to monitor the online media, and frankly, Twitter is not such a complex platform anyway.

Twitter has nothing groundbreaking. Its power is in the hands of the users. Once something cooler comes along Twitter will face the unavoidable decline. Twitter’s only real chance is mobile, but the company already rejected Apple’s offer.