I suggested that to @stop on Twitter but didn't get a response.
In all seriousness though, I want to give Twitter money. It has contributed to my career in ways I'll never be able to fully measure and I feel like I owe Twitter something. Ads and intrusive trend bars are annoying, so I'd much rather give money. Monthly plans, yearly plans, "pro" plans... I don't care. They just need to get something in place.
We follow who we follow because we aren't interested in the rest. It's really bad to force follow a source of information that we don't care about. These ads are way not relevant.
- I was offered two technical editor gigs for iPhone development & design books because the main editor of the project found me on Twitter.
- I built a friendship with a fellow UI guy that turned into a business relationship and I'm now speaking at his conference in San Diego this spring.
- Without spending any money on marketing, I got over 4,000 signups to an email list that will announce when my next big project is launching. All I did was tweet about it.
- Again, without spending any money, I tweeted about a Mac twitter app I was working on last year and it up becoming a trending topic, eventually responsible for over 30,000 downloads.
- I've been able to help friends of mine with their projects (newly-released iPhone apps, website redesigns, icon sets available for purchase, etc.) by linking to them on Twitter. I keep track of all my URL statistics and many times a link I tweet will get over 3k clicks. I've had friends make hundreds of dollars (within an hour or so) directly from a link I tweeted which is pretty awesome.
Sorry to go on and on, but by extracting the positive things that have happened to my career since 2006 (when I first got on Twitter) I can say that nearly all happened because of a relationship built from Twitter. Which is pretty nuts.
Obviously, I was responding to the fact that he had stated that he was helped in immeasurable ways - which I took to mean more than monetarily, so was looking for anecdotes beyond financial value.
It's valuable for the network it brings. However once you start charging for it or spamming it with advertisements then some people will stop using it - and then it's a slippery slope.
No, I think the model is still ads. But if you give people the ability to pay to avoid ads, then the most dedicated twitter users will do so and your ads will dramatically decline in value. Why would an advertiser want to reach only the least engaged segment of your audience?
It seems that no one is interested in the model where subscribers pay for no ads. Look at Hulu. You can buy Hulu Plus and... still get ads. If Hulu Plus was ad free I would sign up immediately.
So why is that? There are several potential reasons:
1. Those providing such services like advertising or, rather, they like the relationships they have with advertisers. Consider [1] (second time quoted this today!):
> Since the carriers had all the power, getting any distribution (which usually meant getting on the handset “deck”) meant doing a business development deal with the carriers. Business development in this case meant finding the right people at those companies, sending them iPods, taking them to baseball games, and basically figuring out ways to convince them to work with you instead of the 5,000 other people sending them iPods and baseball tickets. The basis of competition was salesmanship and capital, not innovation or quality.
Companies, and particularly sales guys, like having something to sell (being ad inventory). They like the perks this gets them (and the commissions of course).
2. Subscribers aren't willing to pay what the advertising brings in. I'm curious about this but haven't seen any numbers. Take an episode of The Big Bang Theory. How much does each episode cost to produce? How much does each ad bring in? How much does the national network earn in affiliate fees? How much of the advertising revenue is product placement? If you had these numbers, you could calculate what each viewer is worth. I suspect it's a lot less than what such companies charge on iTunes and elsewhere;
3. A correlation between the people willing to pay for no ads and being the target of those ads, which means if you're willing to pay for no ads, you need to pay higher than what ad revenue / viewers might otherwise suggest; and
4. Lack of metrics in broadcast and print media. Sales guys are known to exaggerate (and basically just make up) conversion numbers on ad campaigns. The reality I'm sure is a lot less but there's no real way to tell. With online advertising, you can tell, which possibly explains it's lower cost/value compared to traditional advertising;
5. Related to (4), people pay for broadcast and print advertising what they do, largely because that's what it's always cost; and
6. Limited inventory drives up the cost. Inventory is not a problem online.
As for Twitter, I suspect they haven't done anything interesting with advertising (and monetization) because that's a hard problem to solve. I mean, people need to see ads for them to be ads right? At that point, how exactly are you going to advertise to people who mostly use an API, other than through their Twitter stream?
If broadcasters offered an ad-free option, presumably their best audience (from advertisers' view) would choose this. This would make the ad audience much less lucrative for the broadcasters.
I forget where I read this recently, but someone pointed out that magazines cost money to buy, but are chocablock full of ads. Apparently, the revenue from subscriptions and people buying the magazine at newsstands is insignificant compared to the advertising revenue.
Furthermore, the cost of the magazine was used to get more money from advertisers. Since people are shelling out X amount of dollars for the magazine, the sales team can use that to argue that their readers are of a certain income bracket.
So, it could be option 2+, subscribers aren't bringing in anywhere near the amount of money they are getting from advertisers, and they may charge advertisers more*to advertise to their paying customers because they have proven they have already shown a willingness to pay for things (online things.)
