It seems that Twitter, the most popular micro blogging service is in serious need of money. They recently launched the service in Japan and a big banner ad was included in the homepage of every Japanese user.
Also, in August, they made another change in the U.S version, that limits the number of people a single user could connect with or follow to about 2,000. Recently on August 14 they made another big move to cut costs. They removed the outbound message delivery to Mobile Phones via SMS in all countries except U.S, Canada and India.
These thing s sure shows that they are in need of money. Twitter have a large potential of making money through advertisements, unlike other social networking services Facebook and Myspace. One option to make some money is to charge the users for the service but this will be difficult once the service had been started or launched for free.
They can also ask the users to pay for messages of SMS’s they are sending and with millions of messages flying around Twitter can really rake some money in. But obviously users will be against it and may stop using the service.
Advertising is the most viable option for Twitter to make some money. Investors and marketers are aware of the potential Twitter have in ad campaigns but they were never able to make it to the service. But the total potential pool is not huge. Social media sites are notorious for having low ad response rates, and advertisers will enter a new forum cautiously.
But response rates will be low, since other social media, such as Facebook and MySpace, have fared poorly selling stuff to their users. It seems social media users are too busy being social to pay much attention to ads. As marketers see poor results, they will move their ad budgets to other, more responsive ad media. The social media value bubble will be pricked by reality.
Kristen Nicole from Mashable says that avoiding a typical ad distribution network, Twitter may by incorporating branded channels for companies.
Duncan Riley had already posted about Twitter placing some TIP’s below the SMS’s sent out through the service in TechCrunch and thinks that this might turns out to be advertisements in the near future.Might be a trick to know the user responses..?
Whatever it is, I think in near future Twitter also will be acquired by someone like Google or Yahoo. Of course if its alive ….
Website : www.twitter.comService : Micro-Blogging
Available Language(s) : English, Japanese
Location : South Park, San Francisco, California
Founded : March 2006
Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message.The service was started by Obvious Corp, and had launched the Japanese version in April 2008.
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