트위터를 시작했습니다!
twitter.com/inllz
트위터는 140자 이내로 글을 올릴수 있는 마이크로 블로그 서비스입니다.
트위터의 수익모델은 무엇일지?
트위터가 시작된지 꽤 되었고, 이미 수익모델들이 몇개나마 확립되지않았을까하는 생각에 찾아보기 시작했습니다.
먼저 Mahalo.com 의 CEO인 Jason은,
트위터의 BM으로 피드광고와 SMS광고, 유료버전출시 등을 이야기하고 있습니다.
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읽어보기
Allen wrote a blog post today about Twitter focusing on a business model. Allen, my friend, you’re thinking small. Get out of Brooklyn and spend more time in the Valley. Business models!?!?! The business model comes AFTER you get to scale.
When Twitter gets to scale here are the very obvious, and wildly lucrative, business models:
1. In feed advertising
Imagine if every 10th, 20th, or 100th tweet was an advertisement. Would that be so horrible? No, not at all. “your free Twitter account is brought to you by Apple’s iPhone” would be perfectly acceptable to users and advertisers on the web. These ads will get solid click through if targeted well…. also they could be display/visual ads that really “pop” off the page since Twitter pages are text based (as opposed to say Flickr where the graphical ads would compete with the photos).
2. SMS Advertising
Users would be perfectly fine if every 100-200 or so SMS Tweets they got an advertisement. If/when Twitter turns on SMS advertising they will have the largest independent inventory of SMS advertising in the world. You think Google or a carrier mighty be interested in that?
3. Subscriptions
I’ve been asking Ev to pay for a reliable Twitter professional service fro over a year. I would estimate 1-5% of Twitter users would pay for a professional version that had 99.9999% up time, as well as special features like file storage for MP3 files, photos and videos (i.e. like Pownce’s pro account). This might “only” be a ten to fifty million a year opportunity, so I wouldn’t focus on it.
Bottom line? Ev shouldn’t worry about a business model for another two years. Just build the service to *massive* critical mass. Get to 100M users–which is where the service is headed. If the service gets to 100M monthly users it will be worth a couple of billion.
That’s what I learned at AOL: Once you have critical mass you can’t help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money.
Game over.
Done.
Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore–it’s about critical mass. It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.*
* Note: if you’re not a player like Ev, and you don’t have unlimited access to capital do not take this advice and focus on building revenue streams.
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twitAD Founder의 댓글이 눈에띄네요^^
twtiAD는 구글애드센스와 비슷하게, 트위터 사용자에게 자신 페이지의 배경화면을 광고주가 원하는 배경으로 깔아주고, 구독수에 따라서 가격이 정해지게 됩니다. twitAD는 그 과정에서 5%의 수수료를 챙기게되구요.
여기에서 더 나아가서,
기부로 까지 이어지게 할 수 있는 adCause도 생겼습니다.
IconFactory 에서는 MAC/아이폰용 어플인 Twitterrific을 만들어서,
광고를 보면 무료로, 안보면 $14.95를 내는 쉐어웨어 형태로 제공하여 돈을벌고 있습니다.
2008년 앱스토어의 SNS App 중 5위를 기록했습니다.
다른 유명 블로거인 Melissa Chang 는,
affiliate program 과 API 에코시스템, 모바일에서의 BM 등을 이야기합니다.
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읽어보기
1) Banner Advertising — This may not be a creative audience-based money maker, but it works. Advertising is based on audience size, and with a large audience, Twitter should be able to crank out some money using traditional banner advertising. Twitter is already trying this experiment in Japan, and if it is successful, there is no reason that the company won’t roll banner advertising out to Twitter users everywhere.
2) Paid Posts — Banners won’t reach the hundreds of thousands of users who don’t actually use the Twitter.com site, but who only interact with Twitter through third-party applications or SMS messaging. By allowing advertisers to pay to send a Twitter post that is distributed to all (or a percentage of) Twitter users, advertisers will be able to reach the audience in a relevant format. Posts would have to be tagged as sponsored, of course, and there would have to be limits on the number and frequency that they are sent to users, but this would be a fast way to reach the vast audience.
3) Sponsorships — If Twitter decides that it doesn’t want to manage a large number of advertiser relationships (which can be a big pain), it could opt for a sponsorship model that would allow one advertiser to sponsor the entire site for a period of time. That sponsor would dominate the inventory — the banner slots, the paid messages, etc. — and this type of sponsorship would not come cheap. But many companies will leap at the chance to be affiliated with such a popular and cutting-edge service. And the first few companies to do so will likely get a ton of publicity, as well.
4) Charge for ad-free usage — No doubt many people will protest if Twitter adds advertising, since the service has been ad-free for so long. For those people, Twitter could introduce a no-ad option that would require users who didn’t want to see any ads to pay to use the service. This is something that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams did when he started Blogger, and it could definitely work again here.
5) Tiered subscription model — Many Twitter users have been clamoring for a paid version of the product for months, offering to pay to use Twitter if it just would stay up. Twitter will always need to maintain a free service level in order to appeal to the masses and to continue to grow its audience, but there is clearly an opportunity to charge users for enhanced capabilities. For example, there may be subscriptions that promise constant uptime, offer the ability to include photos, or provide the option for other types of posts. Or, what if Twitter simply charges users $1 each week that it doesn’t go down? That would give users what they want, and would give Twitter a financial incentive to increase uptime, as well.
6) Offer a monitoring package for businesses — There has been no lack of publicity for the companies that are using Twitter effectively. Zappos and Comcast come to mind. But most companies haven’t even heard of Twitter, let alone started using it. Building a business-to-business interface that would allow companies to monitor their reputation on Twitter — and begin to participate in the conversation — should be relatively straightforward. And if Twitter charged companies to use the service, it could make money quickly. (Perhaps this is better as an idea for a new company based on the Twitter API, which brings us to the next idea . . .)
7) Charge companies that use the Twitter API – Twitter’s API has been used to build some cool applications — Twitterrific and Twhirl come to mind. And the API has at least 10x the amount of traffic of the Website, according to Williams. All the companies that are using the Twitter API can profit from the use of it with no benefit to Twitter. If Twitter continued to allow the free use of the API, with an understanding that they would get a percentage of all earnings based on profits, there would be some immediate revenue. Another suggestion is to charge for API requests with request-rate surcharges.
Affiliate program — Users are recommending products, services, restaurants, stores and countries to visit all day long on Twitter. An affiliate program would allow users to sign up to start making money on some of their recommendations. If a user recommends a product that is part of the program, the user — as well as Twitter — would get a percentage of the sale.
9) List rental — This may be a very Web 1.0 idea, but if Twitter put its opt-in email list on the market, it would earn a pretty penny.
10) Mobile payments — This idea comes courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider, and it’s a good one. The P2P mobile payment market is wide open, and Twitter has the stuff in place to be able to capitalize.
These are just some of the many ways that Twitter could start making money quickly. Until it decides on a business model, however, Twitter will keep growing its audience while getting its cash the old-fashioned way — through VC funding.
Follow Melissa Chang on Twitter @mchang16. She is the founder of Pure Incubation, an Internet incubator based in the Boston area, and has a blog at 16thletter.com.
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트워터는 아직까지 scale을 늘리고 있는 중이고, 앞으로 다양한 BM들을 보여주리라 기대됩니다. 특히 모바일2.0시대에서 SNS 시장이 기대되는 가운데,
미니블로그를 표방한 프렌드피드를 비롯해 자이쿠(구글 인수).. 사이에서
트위터가 어떤 위치를 차지하게 될 것인지도 지켜봐야할 것 같습니다.
우리나라에서의 이와 비슷한 개념의 tossi, me2day, playtalk 등도 앞으로의 향방이 주목됩니다. 하지만 이러한 서비스가 일대일의 커뮤니케이션인듯 하지만 사실은 다수와 다수의 멀티커뮤니케이션이라는 점을 생각해보면, 싸이월드에서 '비밀이야' 기능이 중요해진 것에서 알 수있듯이 우리나라의 정서와는 맞지 않는 부분이 있지 않은가도 생각이됩니다.
