Los Angeles Times runs a piece on Twitter, focusing on how to make money on the service. They’ve got co-founder Biz Stone to mention some of the models considered, like the corporate accounts approach, as well as identity verification. I like that last one, it is funny since it point to a flaw in social media rather than actually adds something that shouldn’t already be there:
“Like, users who want to know: is that the real Shaquille O’Neal or not?” Stone said. “Maybe we could help users by saying, Yup, definitely the real Shaquille O’Neal. That’s a real account. We checked with them.”
That being said, the article is more focused on the ad services already running on Twitter, especially since Stone himself doesn’t consider ads at this time. Twittad is mentioned, obviously a more successful service that I could’ve guessed.
The third-party service, launched in August, has attracted more than 1,600 sign-ups and 170 advertisers, according to James Eliason, founder and chief executive of Twittad, a Des Moines, Iowa, company.
Now, the article doesn’t state what the company, nor the actual twitterers, made from these campaigns, but still.
Another one is Be-A-Magpie, the pay-per-tweet service that pumps out paid tweets to your followers. We’ve mentioned it before, and I can’t say I’m very fond of the thought myself. Then again, it kind of depends on how you use Twitter. For me, it is a way to communicate with my followers, hence I’m speaking. For a service or a site, it is an ad among the content, much like the ads you can see on a website. And the paid tweets are labeled not always labeled, so although I doubt the average Magpie user will be transparent about it, it is possible to see which tweets that at least some of the tweets are ads through the #magpie hashtag or similar.
Biz Stone is obviously not against services like Be-A-Magpie, at least not openly. This is what he said to LA Times:
“I think any kinds of projects that focus more on the Twitter updates are more compelling,” Stone said.
Maybe that is a sign of what might come, should Twitter need to monetize quickly?
