Twitter Revenue Idea

This is actually a comment that I posted on this TechCrunch article

It’s interesting I’ve been thinking and talking to friends about this concept over the past few days and started a decent conversation on Twitter today about it.  Twitter’s value is the data that it is collecting from an exponentially growing number of diverse users each day.  The data is the reason that Twitter raised an additional $35 million from an extremely intelligent and sucessful group of investors.

My original Tweet today was “I still think a viable business model for Twitter would be to charge me access to a non-production replicated database to write SQL against”

I have to disagree somewhat with John Borthwick though because I think partnering with Google would only expose Googles interpretation of the Twitter datastream, through Google’s algorithms and potentially reduce Twitter’s competitive advantage over Google in this category.

I say sell the data at a premium to companies who have figured out that the only way to understand our generation is to participate with us in the conversation.

The data in it’s purest form (directly from Twitter) is what I beleive will eventually lead to larger businesses wanting to license non-production, but replicated Twitter database instances for them to write their own custom queries against.  No matter what UI you put on top of any data source, it still isn’t as powerful as being able to write SQL directly against a database.  No APIs, Firehoses, whatever….just a datasource and a team of analytics guru’s finding trends by writing SQL.

As I pointed out to someone who replied to me today on Twitter “agree APIs are nice (free) but bigger companies have full analytics/reporting teams and money, want to sit on all of the data”.  I know this because I’ve spent many years working with this contries largest provider of real estate data.  Big companies want the data and they will pay big money for it.  I think Twitter and it’s investors know this.

I think Twitter’s challenge is doing enough homework to show these bigger companies that the data that they have is valuable and will gain them access to our generation of consumers.  Why?  Because not all companies GET IT yet.  They have to convince big companies that the data that they want is not only in their possesion but that it’s growing at unbeleivalbe rates.  The second biggest challenge I think they have is how to handle the growth if unfiltered access to the data tips.

What about costs?  Like I said on Twitter today, “Twitter should probably start at $100k/month to find the companies who were really serious about partnering with them IMO”

I beleive that the unpaid “product” ambassadors on Twitter are far better than the ranks of big corporate marketing and community departments.  Eventually big companies will get it and join in.  When that happens, Twitter will get to pay some investors.

February15