Twitter to start charging for commercial use
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is today reported to have announced the service may start charging for commercial use. Sharp-eyed Biz notes:
There’s no indication of the cost yet.
How will Twitter decide what constitutes ‘commercial use’? Will Stephen Fry get charged, for example? Surely that would be an example of a celebrity using Twitter to advance his personal brand, although I’m certain Mr Fry would reject that idea. In practice, won’t this turn into another case of a social media service making fairly arbitrary decisions about who to charge based on their perception about a company’s ability to pay. Start-ups and ‘cool’ Web 2.0-style services will get away with it but the big boys will get hammered. This is hypocritical: you can’t spend half your time having a go at old-school businesses for being backwards in failing to adopting the ‘culture of generosity’ whilst simultaneously punishing them for not being cool with an inequitable pricing policy that prohibits them from using these services.
We tried to use a prominent photo-sharing service on one of our sites last year. The costs we were were quoted were ridiculous, and the sell was utterly unconvincing in terms of the supposed benefits for our client. I found the whole episode quite depressing.
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About the author
Tim has been creating innovative online community stuff since 2000 and was recently named as one of Revolution Magazine's 'Future 50' - one of the the "marketers, authors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers who will shape the digital industry of tomorrow". It also called him "disruptive and challenging". Tim is a founding partner of Made by Many, Agilist, strategist, Dad and designer of social software.
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Comments (9)
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Responses (7)
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A farse. What about open web. Direct route to failure I’d say.
carl
February 10, 2009
at 10:52 am
I had quite a long philosophical conversation with Fiona about this when she was writing the article, which is not entirely summed up with the quote she used (I’ve got some work to do on the pithy sound bite front, obviously).
The challenge Twitter will face is that there’s such a grey line between personal and commercial use.
Aside from the celebrity issue, where they are clearly individuals, but using the service for commercial gain, it’s grey elsewhere too.
If I spend a lot of my time on Twitter talking about business related stuff, where does that leave me?
For brands overtly using Twitter, it’s not black and white either. Look at Ford’s Scott Monty for example (@ScottMonty), who uses his personal account to represent Ford. Even the account we run for Skype (@PeteratSkype) is as an individual not a brand (as is the same for all of Dell’s accounts). And of course Zappos famously have hundreds of employees on Twitter
Let’s face it, one of the reasons that Twitter is popular is because it’s such an interesting mix of both your personal and your business life – if fact, unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, it lets you be the whole you. Twitter will be risking a lot if they try to change this.
Robin Grant
February 10, 2009
at 10:56 am
I hope you’ve misread their intention. From what Biz says in his second tweet, it seems that they are planning an opt-in service. If you want the features that “make this service even more valuable”, then you’ll pay. If not, you won’t.
If they could offer a premium API service, which is not throttled so tightly and which had a some kind of SLA, that would be worth something too I would have thought.
If you’re right and they’re planning to point a finger at individual accounts and make them pay a fee, then they’ve gone mad. I’m sure that’s not it.
James Higgs
February 10, 2009
at 11:00 am
the question is, will the “culture of generosity” survive the recession?
and, isn’t selling stuff the new “free”?
http://www.drama20show.com/2009/02/06/pragmatic-advice-sell-stuff/
ab
February 10, 2009
at 11:47 am
I read it the same way as James. And although there clearly will be issues with how this all gets implemented, I don’t blame Twitter for wanting to monetize their services…
Elin
February 10, 2009
at 12:09 pm
I’m pretty sure they will end up offering a value added paid service (of course marketed as commercial account). A lot of businesses, would pay for stuff like having access to access data for their twitter account and integration support etc.
Sindri
February 10, 2009
at 1:35 pm
I’d say a premium API will be immensely valuable, as will branded pages and better reporting for corporate users but surely it should be about “cash for features”, not “cash for being corporate” otherwise the difficulty is where you draw the line and that will always be subjective on Twitter’s side.
stuart
February 10, 2009
at 2:11 pm
Thanks for your comments everyone. Clearly Twitter will have to make some money *one day* – nothing wrong with that. And Maybe the statements they’ve been making were actually directed rather more at their investors, and/or intended to test the water. Sounds like many would be prepared to pay fir a premium service anyway. I’m still worried.
Tim
February 10, 2009
at 8:06 pm
(sorry about my sub-optimal english – it were on an ifone)
tim
February 11, 2009
at 7:59 am