Slashdot Mirror
Twitter To Add Money-Making Features
dreemteem writes "Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters in Mexico City this week that the company expects to add revenue-generating features to the micro-blogging site in the fourth quarter, according to a report from Bloomberg.com."
So this will basically be used to decide when to astroturf.
Caveat Utilitor
140 cents should be enough for everybody.
I've never understood how Social Networking sites made enough money off of JUST advertising. Maintaining a website once it reaches popularity is a costly venture.
I think the idea is that you don't have to generate any content. It's "social networking" - so your users generate all their own content by chattering away at eachother.
You need to supply bandwidth/servers/storage/whatever, but not content.
I still find it hard to believe that anyone can make enough money from advertising along to support something the size of these sites...
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
So, the article says that they'll offer a "dashboard" which companies can use to see what users are twittering about them. How is this different from just putting a company name into the search box?
Also, the free Twitter API already allows for interesting data mining. For example, this little site monitors the popularity of the political parties in Germany: Wahlgetwitter. The users just write #Piratenpartei+ or #CDU- to show which party they like or not.
The worst thing this announcement could mean is that they'll charge for the API or exclude businesses from the search function.
they will become an irrelevent has-been 2 weeks later.
That's the downside?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Allow people to pay money to deliver electrical shocks to celebrities every time they "tweet" something stupid. They could make millions in a matter of minutes.
Network television is supported by advertising alone, and their costs are far, far higher than the cost to run a social networking site. Yes, advertising revenue online is peanuts compared to TV advertising revenue, but the costs are also peanuts in comparison. On the other hand, the reason online sites are always looking for new ways to insert advertising in the user experience is because, although they might make enough to be profitable, they still aren't raking in "buy your own country" money.
Allow messages over 140 characters, but charge $0.05 for them. They may still want to limit the size to avoid people writing novels, but they can set a limit for paid messages at 500 chars or so.
Of course, posting witty comments in Slashdot contributes way more to humanity.
Most people think tweeters just post where they are or what they are doing. A great number of people use twitter for publishing their opinions and interesting articles. It is not very different of Slashdot, it's just not topic-oriented and has a limit of 140 characters per post, what doesn't stop anyone from from making several posts or linking to a blog where the opinion is better explained.
How irrelevant the "tweet" is depends on the person.
Several news sources and stores also have twitter accounts, so the people can subscribe to them easier than they would with a RSS news reader. While some might argue they don't need it, it groups all the information in a format which is easier to read and makes any link you might want follow readily available.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Google is.
And this makes me wonder what the disconnect is. Since it's correct that Network television has much higher costs than any website, and yet in many cases has fewer advertising eyes than major websites. (Especially when you consider tivo and people wandering off to get a coffee in ad breaks)
Which leads me to consider that TV advertising is probably vastly over inflated, and overrated, and that web advertising -- should someone take the time to do it in a contextual, non-invasive and entertaining way -- it vastly undervalued and underrated.
I suspect the advertising industry itself is really to blame for its own shortsightedness. It really should be possible, and easy for anyone with a reasonably successful website to hook up with advertisers with ease and fear of annoying their site visitors, and transforming their website into a flashing, flickering spawn of hell.
But as long as the industry is trusting flawed rankings like Nielsen and Alexa, there won't be much change.
This change needs to happen - urgently. By making this happen, it will help end piracy and the ridiculous cartel that is the music industry and film distribution. Content can be set free.
Damn inflation, I remember when you used to be able to give an opinion for 2 cents!
One issue is exclusivity.
A well produced tv advert on a major channel conveys a message of "we are a big stable company who can afford to make a good quality advert and buy expensive TV time to show it". That message is somewhat reassuring to customers. Not saying big companies are angels but at least there is likely to be someone left to complain to/sue when your product doesn't turn up or turns out to be faulty.
Whereas with internet advertising adverts from reputable firms are mixed in with adverts from companies that are frankly outright scammers and often are outside your jurisdiction making them very difficult to go after legally.
Another issue is the targetting sucks, I see adverts that are clearly aimed at americans all the time on slashdot, can't they seem i'm coming from british IP addresses?!
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Damn inflation, I remember when you used to be able to give an opinion for 2 cents!
I take it you've never studied economics. Instead of boring you with lots of technical terminology and theory, I'll restrict my comments to real world transactions and use commonly understood terms.
In the marketplace of ideas, opinions typically come in two forms. The first is worth 5 cents (as in "Not worth a plug nickel"), and the latter is a premium product valued at 10 cents ("I wish I had a dime for every time ..."). And like in all markets, there are "wholesale" prices and "retail" prices. Those numbers represent the retail prices.
When exchanging goods or services, there is an underlying cost for each transaction that must be bourne by one or more of the participants. The difference between 10 cents and your two cent idea is, of course eight cents. This is the "markup" or "overhead".
Put simply, when you manufacture your idea, its wholesale price is two cents, but is sold in the marketplace at either 5 or 10 cents. Small amounts, to be sure, but that doesn't prevent entrepreneurial resellers from making much more, or for those with sufficient legal resources, from securing a patent and making millions!
My idea (for this post) was similarly worth two cents. That's not to say, however, that in the marketplace of ideas known as Slashdot, the laws of supply and demand don't apply. That means that there's high probability it will end up being worth zero cents. Or to use the English formative of Latin origin, nonsense.
Twitter to add money-making features? Twitter is a marketing tool which happens to be abused by teenagers who want the world to know when they're taking a dump and what kind of stool samples they've produced. It's an RSS on steroids. This story is basically saying Steinway & Sons to Add Music Making Features
They don't.
The way I see it, a typical social networking site LOSES money.
1. get funded and become popular
2. make a lot of noise so everyone knows about you to attract tons of investment money.
3. sell to a larger company at inflated values... PROFIT
4. larger company tries to monetize and realizes that they wasted money.
5. site becomes so-last-year and dies a slow, painful death.
What I expect is that they are boosting their "perceived" value in hopes that they can get an inflated offer to buy them out. That's what I would be doing. Trying to generate direct income with twitter will not be easy, and if they fail it will likely destroy any chance of turning a big profit off the large user base they developed.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I work in the business, and you're right, budgets for TV advertising are generally out of all proportion to the results they generate. It's one of the big frustrations of producing advertising-related websites - clients are not only stingy with the budgets, but they want chapter and verse on exactly what they're getting for their money. Whereas with TV, they'll piss millions up the wall on bloated follies just because they like the concept. If a website fails (and let's face it, most do), you'll have a hard job ever selling another one to them, whereas with TV, they just keep coming back for more.
I think the reasons for this are complex, but it's partly historical - TV ad budgets are massive because they've always been massive, and they haven't fully adjusted to the fact that their audiences have mostly vanished. We don't sit around in our tens of millions watching a couple of channels any more. We're spread across dozens of them, and that's if we're in the house at all - increased prosperity means that people can afford to go out more. And even when we are watching, we'll skip the ads if at all possible. Or just not bother with the broadcasts and buy/download stuff to watch at our leisure. The consumer is fully in control nowadays.
And yet here's the web, where the fact that the consumer is in control is its main virtue, but budgets are relatively tiny. I think that for the most part the industry's still figuring out how to consistently pull in eyeballs, and also how to charge for those eyeballs once they have them. It's just hard to persuade clients that they're getting value for money, even though in my view, if you can actually persuade a user to come and have a look around your website, that's infinitely more valuable than the televisual blunderbuss approach to getting your message out there to the passive masses who mostly just want you to go away so they can get back to watching the show.
It'll change one day. It has to. TV nowadays has much less to offer as an advertising medium than the web.