Why Twitter won’t do affiliate
Dan’s post, “The Value of Twitter is in the Shared Links” brought up the fact of how to monetize Twitter. He says:
Twitter needs to montise, just in the away a normal affiliate publisher would, by tracking links behind the scenes and grabbing a commission where it can.
Monetization by affiliate would not be a smart move for Twitter. Why is to do with who creates the content. On typical affiliate sites, the affiliate links are made by the marketer as it’s their own content - Twitter doesn’t create the content that would be monetized.
A Twitter user can decide to monetize their account by inserting their own links into their own content. This isn’t analogous to Twitter inserting affiliate links into other people’s content - Twitter is meant as a platform for content, similar to SMS, email and post. I certainly wouldn’t be happy with Twitter sneakily monetizing the content that I created.
If Gmail automatically put affiliate links into emails instead of using Adwords, their users wouldn’t be happy with their emails being edited for other people’s revenue stream in that way.
So how should Twitter make money? There are several options for them - everything from paid accounts to advertising.
What I would do is have free accounts that get advertisements based on data. Twitter has a fantastic wealth of personal data, only matched by Facebook, that could be mined for relevant advertising
The advertisements would be in the stream like any other tweet, in a similar way to how The Deck advertises in Twitterrific, but they would be based on usage rather than time. Say for every 100 tweets you receive, including from the people you follow, there would be an advertisement. The more you use Twitter, the more adverts you receive.
There would also be paid accounts at a low price, around $5 a month or $25 a year, similar to paid Flickr accounts. The payment would get rid of those advertisements and certain restrictions (e.g. you can’t follow 200 more than the amount who follow you).
It will be interesting in what way Twitter will monetize. There really is a lot of scope for what they could do, and it might take a while for them to get it right, but it really has become an integral part in a lot of geeks (and now non-geeks) lives that I believe a lot of people would be willing to pay a small amount for it to keep going.
