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Twitter Hasn't Made a Dime but Twitterrific Is Making Bank
Written by Allen Stern - November 1, 2007
Twitter, the microblogging, ego boosting service hasn't made a dime since launch. Some use the tool a ton, some a little but to-date there hasn't been any monetization.
Charlie O'Donnell had an interesting post last month between two NY'ers (Nate and Caroline) exchanging something about cowbells and found an interesting additional 26 characters on the text version that came across with the word "Tip" at the beginning. Charlie believed that this might be the first step to Twitter monetization. I haven't seen or heard any reports since this post last month.
Today IconFactory launched version 3.0 of the Twitterrific tool. They offer two versions: free with ads or $15 with no ads. Some of the power-twitters are raving about the new version - see here, here and here.
So while Twitter can't seem to get a monetization strategy in place, Twitterrific is bringing in some level of cash.
Update: Chris Messina has posted some screenshots of the ads in Twitterrific. (I can't embed them due to his CC license)
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I just wonder how twitter really could make money? I guess whatever the people using the API do - twitter could do it themselves. Clients with or without ads, website with or without ads, etc..
If you are doing the "with or without ad thing", in my opinion, you are shooting yourself in the leg. Because you try to embrace advertisers, on the other hand you offer away to keep them out? Where is the sense in that.
And where is the business relationship any sane person would get into? You let people bail out for 15 bucks.
SMS advertising seems to become the first real mobile content monetization play outside of tiny WAP ads. There are not many players in this market yet (besides http://4Info.net). The problem I see here is that the audience ultimately isn't going to be very targeted and will have extremely high frequencies from few users - not what advertisers are looking for. But it's definitely an interesting field!
I'm sure the folks at Twitter think it's great than someone using their API is making money. They have a great thing and I think the smart people there are working on monetization right now.
Re: $15 Subscription vs. Ads
I've always loved this idea. For starters, giving users a choice puts control in their hands (where it should always be).
Secondly, showing advertisers that there are people willing to pay to support the site doesn't mean that everyone else hates it, it paints an even better picture, saying that they have users willing to pay for a pure experience. It's always better to offer something else for the money, of course, not just "no ads", but giving your users control is always the best move.