I found this article via a twitterfriend of mine @kathrinkawaters and wanted to comment on this article which was published by InfomationWeek.
Twitter was established in 2006, and has grown to be the largest microblogging platform used by millions of people all over the world. According to twitter inc, the main purpose is to share snippets of your life; «Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?” Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or web»
The developent has made twitter to be a sharing platform, where it’s active users adds value to the community by giving links to different and interesting things to be found on blogs, newsites, youtube, and other sites with content.
But the challenge for twitter is the moneymaking. As they state themselves «While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make»
The article points out that there are challenges for twitters businessmodell, since they send a lot of traffic to social sites and entertainment sites
But it could do better, too. Twitter doesn’t send much traffic to business/finance sites or shopping/classified sites, categories where there’s money to be made from affiliate deals, sales commissions, and the like. As a consequence, its path to profitability may be more circuitous than the road available to a search engine.
That’s not to say there’s no value in feeding the social network ecosystem, but social networking sites have proven difficult to monetize with online ads. Search is a cash cow because searches often express a desire to find and buy something. On social networks, the interaction is, as might be expected, social and not commercial.
There are some people on twitter that tries to simply enter the scene with the obvious intention to make money, and spamming links and comments about themselves and their product, but they soon discover that they get removed and that people don’t listen.
The fact remains, it all about authenticity, keeping it real, and add value to those that are following you. But I agree – twitter’s future looks more Social than commercial, or better yet, twitter may develop to be the catalyst between the social and commercial world in a more credible way.
How do you think twitter will make money in the future?
Source: Thomas Claburn | InformationWeek
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/web2.0/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215900042&subSection=Web+Development
