Suggestion to Twitter: Here’s how you monetize without ruining your ecosystem

http://www.techfounder.net/2012/09/01/suggestion-to-twitter-heres-how-you-monetize-without-ruining-your-ecosystem/

by pytrin • 14 years ago

26 21 14 years ago

diego6• 14 years ago

Yes, there is more to it than you're aware of. For starters, how do you think Twitter's API customers would monetize their applications? They would be paying Twitter for the privilege of attempting to monetize tweets. It only makes sense to pay if they can extract more value than Twitter can.

If someone finds a way to monetize tweets that's more effective than Twitter's, then Twitter would have an incentive to copy it, therefore competing with its customers.

Long story short, that's the reason Google stopped selling white label search via its api to customers like Yahoo ten years ago.

pytrin7• 14 years ago

I think you missed the point of the article. Right now, Twitter has rigid limits in place - you don't think it'd be better for developers to at least know in advance they can go past that limit, even if it means they have to pay?

There are many uses for twitter data outside of just repeating the tweets with a different design. There are quite a few Twitter apps that generate revenue and some have also been acquired by bigger companies. Twitter and Google main service offering are not comparable, since Twitter has the actual data while Google is a gateway.

diego6• 14 years ago

I didn't miss the point. Twitter does not want developers to go past that limit. Pay or no pay, it doesn't matter to Twitter. It's not part of the plan.

badclient• 14 years ago

Each has its own merits in the context of sports competitiveness, but in Twitter's case there is no reason for a hard cap at all. What does Twitter gain by putting a hard limit on API usage?

There is a reason for a hard cap: the limit's goal is to ensure twitter-owned clients dominate the market for basic twitter use.

You may have a point by saying that twitter can simply make the tax per additional tweet equal to the approximate revenue they plan to lose as a result. But that figure may be hard to calculate, especially its long-term value. So even if a company is willing to pay 5x to twitter per additional tweet over the hard limit, twitter doesn't know the long-term impact of it

pytrin7• 14 years ago

My argument is that they'd make much more revenue by taxing API than they hope to make with ads. Their API usage is obscene and growing rapidly, while ads don't really fit their users usage patterns.

diego6• 14 years ago

They are making hundreds of millions of dollars with ads. What do you mean by "ads don't really fit their users usage patterns"?

I hate ads as much as anyone, but they are working for Twitter. If you think Twitter's executives don't know what they are doing, you underestimate them.

progolferyo• 14 years ago

In theory, i like the idea but I can't see paying for an API like a service would generate as much money for them in the long run as their current ads strategy. API Services tend to cap out at a certain rate so then you need to start offering unlimited packages, etc. Companies are not going to be paying millions of dollars for API services, I cant think of one example where this is remotely valid.

Have you thought about how Twitter would actually structure something like that? Twitter is monetizing FAR FAR better than any of these other small Twitter API clients. Something like Tweetdeck might have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars, but thats a joke compared to the kind of money Twitter is dealing with.

gk_jam• 14 years ago

All these articles claiming Twitter is restricting developers using their API are all missing one important distinction: Twitter is only restricting Twitter client developers. There are hosts of other developers who are using the Twitter API with no restrictions, those building value add services in Social CRM (social media monitoring, analytics, data reselling, sentiment analysis, etc). Yes, Twitter's new ecosystem is geared towards the B2B market. But to say they're restricting developers across the board just isn't true. However, it seems most of the tech blogs tend to think only of consumer-facing client apps as the members of the Twitter ecosystem, and so forget about all the other apps out there, the ones they're not restricting.

dustyreagan• 14 years ago

Well, I think the point is, building Twitter clients use to be allowed, even encouraged, by Twitter. And now it's a big no-no. So even though they're only restricting new client development, the restriction affect anyone developing with the Twitter API. What's not to say the type of app you're building today won't be restricted tomorrow.

scott_s• 14 years ago

As I understand it, Twitter already makes plenty of money off of their data. Many companies are interested in getting access to more data than what's available for free, and they pay for it. Check out DataSift and Gnip: they are resellers of various social media data.

Suggestion to Twitter: Here’s how you monetize without ruining your ecosystem

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