Maddening how incompetent Twitter is at strategic thought. They have arguably the most politically and civically important property on the internet but wish they were Facebook.
Twitter is a Bentley in a market that wrongly thinks it should be Honda. The value of a network is as much the value of its participants as it is size. There is nothing wrong with Twitter, quite the opposite
Twitter's key users are making, reporting and breaking news. The second and third order effects of this are enormous, far surpassing Facebook.
The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter.
Unfortunately I think they're still chasing the wrong dollar. They should be monetising their publishers and not just their audience.
Twitter should let publishers paywall their articles and then authorise and take micropayments via http://t.co on their behalf.
Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement:
- Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions.
- Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share.
- Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops.
They'd finally be a viable business. And their incentives would be aligned with publishers.
Twitter could create a micro payment tip system as a button next to the heart. Give popular users a way to monetize their followers, creating a virtuous cycle attracting more content publishers.
That's also true but I was also imagining a system which generated and sent on a micropayment authentication id via a redirect when paywalled links are clicked.
Rather than users visiting publishers to find that they'd already read their 10 free articles, publishers would be able to use the id to grant them access to the article for a small fee that Twitter collected on their behalf at the end of the month.
Zero-friction low price articles for users. And customer acquisition costs fall for publishers.
It would also enable small time bloggers to also monetise their audiences.
> The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter.
Okay, expanding... revenue currently based on broadcast value alone. No value is being extracted from communications loops, redirected communications, related content, drill downs, prioritized versions of the aforementioned items, filters (including location-based filters) or monetized karma (eg. Reddit gold). All of these can be accomplished without polluting the UI or purity of the tweet. Additionally, the highest value network members have got to be cultivated, incentivized for tweets, interaction with other network members and tolerating the occasional flame. A mesh networked solution should be in the works with a moderation-bridged pipeline to the conventional twitterverse.
Twitter is a Bentley in a market that wrongly thinks it should be Honda. The value of a network is as much the value of its participants as it is size. There is nothing wrong with Twitter, quite the opposite
Twitter's key users are making, reporting and breaking news. The second and third order effects of this are enormous, far surpassing Facebook.
The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter.
Uuuuugh....