Should Twitter offer a paid service?
November 26th, 2008 | 
Author: So why couldn’t Twitter release a premium level of its service that grants paid users a greater level of access to the platform, additional features, more API connections, etc? This seems the logical next step. The main service would remain free as it always had (even I didn’t need to upgrade until now), but a handful of the Twitter power users would benefit from near-real-time Twitter updates with applications such as TweetDeck and mobile devices for the iPhone or BlackBerry such as Tweetie, Twitterific and TwitterBerry.
Here is some simple math that I’ve worked out. The numbers seem fairly reasonable so far and I welcome comments on this model. TwitDir reports 3,328,420 twitterers that they know as of today. I’ll use this as the base number for my calculation. If we estimate that there are 3.3 million Twitterers out there sharing ideas, and only 5% of them are power users that require a more powerful level of Twitter power (166,421), paying only $2.99/mo…
| Users: | 3,328,420 |
| 5% paying: | 166,421 |
| $2.99/mo | $497,598.79 |
| $4.99/mo | $830,440.79 |
That’s almost a half a million dollars of revenue for Twitter and all they had to do was scale up a few servers and spend a few hours coding the management/login area for users. Hardly anything else needs to change. The infrastructure has already been layed out and is operational. If they wanted to, they could charge $4.99/mo for a different tier of service and offer other incentives to those users that required even more.
I’ve found myself leaving TweetDeck open on both my Mac (home) and Windows PC (work) and constantly use Tweetie on my iPhone. There go all my API connections for the hour…they’re used up in about 30 minutes even with moderate usage.
The bottom line, would we pay for this service? Is it so necessary to the way that we network now that users would jump into paying for it, or do we only use it now because it’s free? My vote is for the same level of service to remain free, but offer additional options to their already-ginormous user base.
Comments welcome.
Posted in General Posts, Mobile | 
Tags: TweetDeck, Tweetie, Twitter, Twitter API, TwitterBerry, Twitterific
To the general public? No.
Allow companies to point their domain to their service (a la Google Apps) and charge for that. I can’t be bothered with Yammer and Laconica (an open source hosted version) doesn’t really look ready yet.
I would say, that there is a lot of merit to what you say here but I would tweak both numbers.
I would break the numbers instead of a power group at 5%, I would break the power group like you mentioned into 3 groups.
* 3% premium at 4.99 a month ( serious power users )
* .5% developers at 9.99 ( still inside the sweet spot )
* 1.5% Corporate usage ( 29.99 – 49.99 )
The latter is easily within almost any department heads ability to put on recurring billing.
Got rid of the 2.99 because its almost considered a micro transaction and if you do an entire years billing on it, there is no room for discounts.
These other methods give space for 15% discounts for paying the whole thing up front for a year “Sort of thing”
Overall, I agree strongly with you.
Question is, what are they doing for money now?
Who is their benefactor?
Those are very interesting ideas. Corporate usage I haven’t thought about and it could be a hosted app. Nice.
I believe many people would pay the extra cost for the premium service.
thats great that you are talking about the twitter api,a good example of searching with the twitter api is on twiogle.com because you can search on twitter and google at the same time.
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