Twitter – Show me the money!

Posted on April 7, 2009 - by John

Twitter – Show me the money!

Internet reports are giving word recently that Twitter is in “late stage talks” with Google over a proposed acquisition. It won’t be the first time Google has purchased something which is dominating the internet in recent years, such as YouTube. And interestingly enough like YouTube, Twitter, is also a service which has yet to produce any real monetisation strategy .

Could it be be that a company like Google is seeking to control much of the popular content on the internet, regardless of a company’s future financial ability? Does Google just like to have the most popular sites in its portfolio. Or is that too obvious a statement?

Twitter looks to me like a company which will prove hard to monetise, the only real possibility may be a premium account model where people can have some bonus features for a fee of some sort. Such a model is in use by the Flick.com photo sharing site, owned by Yahoo and seems to be doing nicely.

What makes Twitter such an popular service is that surfers are actively using it for a wide variety of reasons. There is the is the celebrity factor – Those interesting MTV (sorry that’s MTV ONE) celebrities on our screens – the Paris Hilton’s of the world all have accounts, and where these people go there will be a bunch of folks following them, sending Tweets to Paris and hoping that she – Paris Hilton herself will acknowledge their existence. There is the casual user who often gives the cringely horrible updates which often includes terrible tweets that track every moment from lunch updates to the trip to the toilet afterwards!

A more interesting part of Twitter which is tied into its popularity is that many organisations and groups are using the service to push updates and stay in contact with their users! That may be where Twitter can offer the premium services. Interesting Twitter was the first with updates on the new Irish Budget, beating RTE and even blogs with the latest breaking news, from trivial comments on politicians clothes to more serious updates on the budget.