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.

One suggestion has been to make every 5th (or 10th or nth number) a sponsored tweet. This is the one suggestion I’ve heard, so far, that seems like it will reach the largest number of users, regardless of twitter app/client — and the one that will put the nail in the coffin for Twitter.

They can also ask for donations like Wikipedia often does, but as we’ve seen with Wikipedia, users alone cannot fund a massive site with a lot of user-driven, updated-in-real-time content. A sponsorship or merger agreement with a bigger company (such as Yahoo!) might work, if only every major company wasn’t trying to compete with Twitter.

They could also follow in the footsteps of LiveJournal, LinkedIn, and other social media sites by having tiers of service — free service gets you 50 tweets a week, for example, and after that there’s a per-tweet charge of 10 cents *or* you can have unlimited tweets for $5/month. Or something like that. Problem is, the minute a company asks for money, people tend to flee like proverbial rats from a sinking ship. As Ramit Sethi has pointed out before, the majority of people want things for *free* and will run when you ask them to dig deep. Of course, he makes his money on those people who are paying for value, but honestly, are you getting *that much* information of value from Twitter that you’d pay for the privilege?

There’s also the idea of making corporate accounts & celebrity accounts (verified) pay for the service, but I don’t think the ROI is high enough on Twitter to justify such an expenditure — and most finance departments are going to want an ROI for their advertising.

At the end of the day, people like twitter because it’s cheap and fast — monetizing, which is 100% necessary to keep the servers and staffers going, is a reality that will be the downfall of Twitter because their service isn’t built for monetization and is too large to continue operating on a free basis.

Of course, we’ll all just have to wait and see what Twitter announces at SXSW this week as it’s amazing new strategy and future outlook. Honestly, I give it two years, maximum, before it goes the way of MySpace, which is now the ghetto of the internet.

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