I was reading this post on mashable earlier, from one of my favourite tech bloggers, Jennifer Van Grove. It’s about a new ‘tweet notification’ feature that Twitter are planning to add, for people who use the Twitter website to tweet.
Twitter business model to include advertising?
twitter_256This got me thinking. In recent weeks, Twitter has made a number of significant improvements to the functionality of the main Twitter website. Most recently we saw the addition of the superb Twitter Lists feature, but Twitter are ALSO working on a new retweet feature too. These improvements have one thing in common; they render web-based apps like Tweetdeck and (my favourite) Seesmic Desktop less and less essential.
Both Tweetdeck & Seesmic Desktop are superb apps, but they are also a lot more resource hungry, than simply using a browser to access the Twitter website. Now that users are able to get all the core functionality direct from Twitter.com, using their favourite lightweight browser – There’s less motivation for NEW Twitter users to bother installing the aforementioned Twitter apps.
The Twitter team are actively, suddenly doing everything they can to make Twitter.com stickier. Obviously, this keeps MORE new users on Twitter.com.
Here’s why I think these recent moves by Twitter are so interesting, from a business model point of view.
Twitter’s business model puzzle
One of the biggest challenges Twitter has had to deal with, is how to turn the popularity of the service into an effective business model. A big reason that this has been such a challenge, is that only a small percentage of tweets are sent via Twitter.com. As a result, Twitter gets just a small percentage of the ‘eyeballs’ it could have; rendering Twitter.com far less attractive for potential advertisers.
I believe the recent introduction of Twitter Lists, project retweet and now the new ‘updates’ feature, show that Twitter is focusing hard on developing a key part of their business model around advertising on Twitter.com. As I mentioned some time ago, Twitter users in some Asian countries already see small banner ads on Twitter.com.
Conclusion
Whilst many longer term users will want to stick with their favourite Twitter desktop apps, there’s less and less reason for new desk-based users to want to use them. This should see a significant increase in the number of people using Twitter.com and as a result, transform the site into a more attractive platform for future advertisers.
Very few users of Twitter are likely to object to ads, particularly if they are somehow targeted around the user’s tweets, so they are relevant. Maybe Twitter users with an objection, could opt to pay a fee to have these ads removed; like wordpress.com do for their users. If you are looking forward to translate this content, contact Translation Agencies UK
What do you think?
