Twitter investor Joi Ito believes that Twitter creates so much extra traffic for network providers that somebody should pay for the usage of Twitter on mobile phones.
“When Twitter grows, SMS usage goes up.
Sites are now able to promote across friends’ [Twitter] networks; traffic to certain kinds of sites increases. There’s a lot of things Twitter enables. And as a normal internet company would do, we’d look at who’s benefiting the most in this value chain, and where is there the least friction [for Twitter] to get paid.” – said Joi Ito.
Biz Stone, co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, said at the 140 Twitter Conference in Los Angeles that advertisements will not find its way to Twitter until next year and that Twitter was “pretty good right now” regarding funding.
But in an exclusive interview, Joi Ito told Guardian Technology that Twitter has already achieved the most important step for any internet company by getting tens of millions of users: “I will say that mobile is globally one of the areas that has significant growth in revenue for a lot of [industry] players… I think mobile will be an important part of the strategy.”
One business model could be the cellphone network providers should pay for the traffic that Twitter generates, like when SMS usage grows, and/or the end-users should pay to use Twitter from their mobile device.
Twitter is now worth 1 billion dollars and has around 30 million users.
Now the billion dollar question is, how much are you willing to pay to tweet? 🙂
my passion for Twitter is already starting to take a back seat to less spammy forms of social networking, so I don’t realistically see myself paying additional fee’s to use Twitter on my mobile phone.
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What other social networks do you use? I have considered facebook but I don’t want to mix in my “blog network” with my private friends and family network and I don’t want to create a new facebook account just for my blog either.
At the same time, you would want to use a social network where many other users are to get as many friends/followers as possible, I would imagine.
I’m not sure I agree with Ito. With the way ISPs have treated net neutrality, it seems more likely that they’d look to Twitter to pay THEM for increasing SMS usage. And with users being able to access Twitter via the web on web-enabled phones, that will be hard to charge a usage fee on that platform (I know I wouldn’t pay, unless the cost were insignificant). The least friction (to use Ito’s term) might be for big companies to pay for some sort of premium account that better helps them get their message out.
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I agree but let’s hope that by law there can at least be net neutrality in the US and that the EU and other countries will follow up.
But it will sure be interesting to see how (if) they manage to monetize twitter.