Twitter today announced that they are no longer giving 3rd party developers a free ride on their platform, demanding a cut of advertising revenues earned by outside 3rd party programs.
According to Duncan Riley:
The new demand follows a change to the Twitter API announced earlier that has banned all third party ad providers from auto-posting to Twitter accounts.
Twitter announced the changes in their Terms of Service (TOS) in which they state they should receive compensation:
“where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale .”
Oddly enough they don’t state what that cut will be, although a 30% charge could be in line given Apple’s success and Facebook’s attempts to collect money at that level.
Analysts have been trying to figure out Twitter’s business model for a while now and this is a good step for the company as they continue to build their revenue model.
It will be interesting to see how these payments work for programs such as Seesmic which offer multiple account types (Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and others) on a single application.
Come on Twitter, pony up some more detailed information.
