Twitter should really allow advertising to your existing following.
I have an account for one of my projects that I use to announce new releases and updates. This happens once every few weeks, so I would pay for an option to stick my tweet at the top of my followers' feeds for, say, a week. If Twitter would then also allow people to unstick a tweet after reading it (or opt out of sticked tweets altogether), I think it'd be a great and welcome feature to have for everyone involved - TWTR gets paid, I get more eyes on my tweet and others won't miss my updates, which is what they followed me for to begin with.
This could really work! I think Twitter is much more about building an public identity than let's say Facebook. If they would allow their user to run minimal budget campaigns this could become much more successful/relevant than the typical Twitter ads.
They know when it's displayed to you. Let's say that Bob follows Sally (and a bunch of other people)
* Sally makes a tweet at 8AM
* Bob doesn't check Twitter until noon
* Bob doesn't scroll down, the tweet at the bottom of the screen is timestamped 11:30AM
In this scenario Twitter never displays Sally's tweet in Bob's timeline. It is thus not an impression. If Bob had scrolled down to see tweets going back to 8AM Twitter would display Sally's tweet in Bob's timeline, this would count as an impression.
If you're asking if they know that you actually read, parsed, comprehended, or contemplated the text of the tweet then no of course not. Likewise somebody clicking on a link doesn't mean they actually read, parsed, comprehended, or contemplated that content.
Of course, and that's how ad impressions are counted. But that doesn't help me as a user, and advertisers pay much less for "impressions" than for an ad that is interacted with in some way. So that's worse for everyone than an ad that you click to dismiss.
This is sort of a silly problem since Twitter started at 100% off-Twitter and has exceeded all predictions at bringing people into their own experience.
There are numerous, straightforward solutions to this. Twitter can require third party apps to show ads, for instance. Twitter can continue to copy functionality from third party apps and then squeeze them down. Or Twitter can worry about this once they are monetizing the bulk of their user base at 99% of the potential.
I think this is genuinely a challenge for Twitter to solve, but I suspect (hope!) internally they spend much more time worrying about getting more users, how to meaningfully innovate and how to make Twitter more essential for the majority of their "sometimes" users.
Not just do they put severe limits on how many users you can get, they also have strict limits on how you are allowed to display the tweets (most importantly you are not allowed to merge feeds from different social networks into the timeline) which means I can't make the app that I wanted (which would take all the users accounts and merge them together).
Their ability to do this, incidentally, is why I hate oAuth.
The simplest solution, honestly, is to just require an application token and bill based on API calls. The only issue is dealing with fraud but that is the same risk you deal with in any business.
IIRC you do need an app token to make requests to the Twitter API, at least for users' timelines. So like gdudeman said, the solution is straight forward - requiring third party apps to show promoted tweets is an easily solution to this problem. They would just include these promoted tweets in with the other tweets in the feed API endpoint (do they really not do this as it stands? Seems like such an obvious thing to do.) Perhaps there's a technical reason for them not doing this, or maybe it's political.
On another note, as an advertiser on Twitter I'm surprised that I'm not allowed to create ads to be displayed to users in countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Ukraine, Argentina, Poland, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Belgium, Greece, and all lesser populated countries.
Since Twitter removed the option to create ads that target users worldwide, it's impossible to create a campaign that displays ads to users in less populous countries.
Has Twitter made a deliberate decision to not monetize their "long tail" foreign users?
> as an advertiser on Twitter I'm surprised that I'm not allowed to create ads to be displayed to users in countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Ukraine, Argentina, Poland, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Belgium, Greece, and all lesser populated countries.
Yet rest (or don't) assured that users in at least couple of those countries do observe promoted tweets, pinned here and there in their timelines. Apparently there is a way.
In general I have a feeling of unease using "free" services, but it is nice to not have to pay for what I think services are worth (e.g., I would value Gmail at $8/month, Google+ at $3/month, Twitter at $2/month, Facebook at $3/month, Blogger at $5/month).
One real value of Twitter, Google+, and Facebook is the quality of what people you are following post. The other (and larger for me) value is promoting my blog. Every time I write a new blog entry, I shamelessly promote it on social media.
This is probably a crazy idea, but I wouldn't mind if these services had "hybrid" paid services: Pay a relatively small monthly or yearly fee, still see just a few advertisements, but much fewer advertisements than the free versions that are more geared to my interests than those advertisements that might make more money for the companies providing the series.
Fortunately for businesses that existed those last 5000 - 15 years, copying a document wasn't free. Information couldn't be mass produced at a scale that renders the notion of supply meaningless.
Businesses now have to compete with open source or decentralized services that cut them out. When money enters the equation, people immediately start shopping, they start asking "Is this an expense that is necessary?"
That plus the amount of uncertainty john q public has on transmitting money online (a reticence I share to be honest), makes paying small fees a large barrier to entry.
Besides, if I've learned anything, I've learned that just because you paid a company money, doesn't mean they won't turn around and sell you up the river. The barriers of trust for a service that's free and non-free are exactly the same.
> Fortunately for businesses that existed those last 5000 - 15 years, copying a document wasn't free. Information couldn't be mass produced at a scale that renders the notion of supply meaningless.
Google and Facebook are not in the document copying business. They index, curate, store and generally make information easy to access. That's a real service which costs real money to offer, and is not going to be just spontaneously overtaken by some FOSS equivalent (whatever that even means). And they could charge real money for it, if they wanted. Personally I would welcome that opportunity if it meant they would treat me more like a customer and less like an ad demographic.
There are distributed social networking systems that have being experimented with. HN has stories showing off a few of them. Facebook has real competition from people who don't have data aggregation or advertisement agendas.
Barriers to entry for these tools are: the technical expertise to setup and run the programs (which is low low low, but still enough), and the obvious lack of users to give the system meaning.
I don't think copying documents is a good comparison, because on the scale of FB/Twitter, the cost of transmitting status messages and photos is certainly not 0 :) You can't get around bandwidth bills by using open source software.
Sorry. I realize the example was symplistic, I was trying to illustrate the way computers have changed and undermined an old information economy. I didn't mean to imply it was the only way it changed that information economy.
You can get around bandwidth bills through distribution. open source is very good at that.
> Paying for the products you used was the dominant way of doing business for the last 5000 - 15 years of human history.
Was? It still is. The number of companies that rely solely or primarily on advertising to generate revenue is pretty small compared to those that charge their customers.
I'm actually curious if you have any sources or statistics to back this up. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd love to see some data on this.
I suspect you're almost surely right when it comes to the number of companies, but I'd be far more interested in seeing analysis on this broken down by volume of dollars / revenue.
For instance, most (all?) professional and even college sports, TV shows, numerous web companies, etc. -- tons of ad revenue, though perhaps relatively small number of companies, but is why I'd be curious to see data on this if you know of any?
Advertising dollars have to be less than what a company makes on the product advertised (at least over the long term, but probably in the short term as well). As such, it would be wholly unsustainable for advertising to be the dominant mechanism of revenue generation globally, since that would imply that companies are spending more on advertising than they could possibly receive from selling their goods and services.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding...perhaps you were referring only to businesses selling access to a web service?
> I'd be far more interested in seeing analysis on this broken down by volume of dollars / revenue.
We don't really need to filter companies that are solely or primarily dependent on advertising. We can compare the entire amount of money spent on advertising (which is a superset of what we're really looking for) versus everybody else (which is just total revenue minus advertising revenue) to see it's not even close.
One source[1] for global ad spending puts it at $467 billion (for 2010), I couldn't find more recent hard data but another[2] estimates it at $581 billion for this year. Let's assume the estimate was right and round up to $600 billion.
WalMart had revenue of $476.3 billion last year[3]. You can combine WalMart and any other company in the top 10 of Fortune's Global 500 and their combined revenue would exceed total advertising revenue[4]. The combined revenue of all 500 is $31.1 trillion[5], even if that included every penny of ad revenue it would still be a ratio of 50:1
If the official Twitter app wasn't so bad I would use it. Twitters problem for me is how hard it is to browse its content. Its website has the same problem. I think they need to look more in to how people want to use their service. I'm sure its different for different kind of users. Eg some one following celebrities vs some one folllowing businessses vs some one following politics
Is there any reason why we can't design a federated (non-centralized) version of twitter that doesn't depend on a business model of monetization? Every ad I see on twitter contributes to (what I assume is) my eventual abandonment of the service.
There's no fundamental reason. I think the internet swings back and forth between periods of openness and periods of walled gardens. We're in a walled garden period. My gut says it won't last forever.
Our current walled gardens succeeded by refining the user experience of the open web they supplanted. They made it easy for normal users to do the things that only advanced users were able to do before: easily publish your own stream of content, find other people's content you care about, aggregate other people's content, and then let everybody generate new content that references the previous content.
None of that is new functionality, but Facebook and Twitter fixed the user experience and taught normal people how to do all of that.
But now that the bar has been raised and the average user groks the benefits of "social networking", there's nothing to stop the technology from eventually being commoditized.
As for business models, a decentralized competitor doesn't actually need a business model, because their infrastructural costs could be zero. "HTTP" doesn't have or need a business model.
Pump.io is a federated microblogging platform that can be used today. You can sign up for a free account on several servers, like Identi.ca or Microca.st.
Twitter… consider this:
The 3rd-party experiences are simply better than your native ones, and not because of their lack of ads. Additionally, your own Tweetdeck and (seemingly abandoned) Twitter for Mac don't display ads.
Twitter's support for Twitter power users, like those who use Tweetdeck has been abysmal. After buying it out, they turned off a bunch of great features the original client had and now rarely issue any updates. I assume they are trying to drive visitors to use the 'official' Twitter site, but it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
No Tweetdeck user views ads, even though Twitter owns and operates the software. The only alternative for PC users is Hootsuite, and it is browser based. For anyone who wants to have multiple columns open at the same time or have notifications of direct messages or @replies, Tweetdeck is (essentially) the only game in town.
I'd happily pay for the ability to use third party clients & no advertising on the main site. Anyone who doesn't want to pay can still use official apps and the website with ads. To me that would be a better solution than just slow killing all the third party apps for everyone.
Personally, I don't use Twitter anymore because I don't care for many of the changes they have made. I'm not talking about the advertising but the UI changes that is too busy. And the last time I created an account, Twitter had greatly complicated its settings, not to mention constantly badgering me to follow people.
Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr all followed the same path: nice, functional interfaces that were needlessly complicated over time.
Well, if Instagram is making money from Twitter users, why is Twitter not asking Instagram for a share? It's a quite straight forward idea and I don't see why there should be a problem. If so many people share from Instagram to Twitter then certainly Instagram wouldn't have a problem paying for the API, right?
I am guessing Twitter doesn't yet see 3rd party clients not showing ads as a big issue, because if it were, they would've shoveled them anyway through a simple T&C change. For larger client developers it'd be an offer they could not refuse, because they are as dependent on T for their revenue as it gets.
It looks like this would imply the next phase will be twitter either killing off third party apps for good (seems like their MO) or creating a federated ad network to insert into these third party streams (they should have done this 4 years ago).
I have an account for one of my projects that I use to announce new releases and updates. This happens once every few weeks, so I would pay for an option to stick my tweet at the top of my followers' feeds for, say, a week. If Twitter would then also allow people to unstick a tweet after reading it (or opt out of sticked tweets altogether), I think it'd be a great and welcome feature to have for everyone involved - TWTR gets paid, I get more eyes on my tweet and others won't miss my updates, which is what they followed me for to begin with.