Most Likely to Take Over the World

A question posed on LinkedIn, in anticipation of Twitter’s monetization plan to be announced at SXSW this weekend, asked “How long has Twitter got left?” This was my reply:

Twitter will die when they monetize, because there’s no way to sustain their current popularity without monetization. Unfortunately, their options to monetize are limited and will either fail or drive away users. Banner & site ads will fail because most users access twitter via another twitter app or client online. They could keyword every tweet & insert adword links, but that would be too intrusive. Ditto for “sponsored by” text appended after each posts ” 7 minutes ago via CoTweet ” text. Merchandising rarely provides enough income for a website. (continue reading…)

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