Yes, after four long years of agile development and rapid prototyping the micro blogging and social networking giant Twitter finally unveiled its much anticipated and discussed about revenue model.
“Promoted Tweets”
According to “About Us” at twitter:
Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now.
Now, what best can a real-time information network actually provide you with? What started of as a simple idea of telling “What are you doing?” in less than 140 characters, has went onto to become a revolution merely because of the simplicity, growth and its capability of leverage the network power underneath. The best thing about Twitter was the openness in its platform with APIs thus allowing thousands of developers to build twitter clients which accounts to more than 75% of network traffic to its network.
At some level, we always knew it would be “advertising” that would be central to their revenue model. But they have gone one step ahead by planning not only display of adds on their website, but also enhanced features like ‘Purchase of keywords’, ‘Tiered Pricing Plans’, ‘Concept of Resonance of Tweets’.
‘Purchase of keywords’: Interested companies or parties can bid for ‘keywords’ and if successful with their bid, they can place their “advertisement tweets” whenever anyone searches with the particular keyword.
‘Tiered Pricing Plans’: Twitter has decided to charge their customers with a pricing plan of 1000 unique visits to their advertisement.
‘Resonance of Tweets’: A terminology thought of by an Indian employee at Twitter, according to which based on the “eventfulness” of Promoted Tweet it will be endorsed further. Say for e.g. you search for Burger, and say Burger King’s promoted tweet shows up as the first search result, but if for a significant amount of time if there is no click or activity on the tweet, the resonance of the tweet decreases and it merely fades off from the search ranking. And best part is the resonance function is tied to their pricing plans, so if the resonance value is low, one has to pay less. 
Now that is definitely interesting and motivating for new players to give it a shot.
Now, how will all this work is something we all need to wait and see. Lets hope Twitter is another ‘Google’ in the making, well hope not exactly like Google either
Some interesting statistics revealed at ‘Chirp’ include:
And, all of this in just 4 years !!
Last but not least, if you are a developer do check out Twitter’s new Development Platform, they have gone one more step ahead of mere APIs which help you create applications and integrate with twitter seamlessly.
Related Post: Twitter Twitter Everywhere, Not a Tweet to Read
