Twitter, the micro blogging service, started its operation in the year 2006. The growth after Twitter's origin was tremendous and today twitter is being used by many corporates, individuals and bloggers as a medium of short and hectic communication. Do you ever wonder how twitter is making revenue? How twitter is maintaining the operational cost? Recently we had a small discussion and analysis about what is going on behind Twitter.
How Twitter manage maintaining costs till 2010?
Twitter was believed to be successful in raising over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding. This money was pumped into Twitter over three installments within the first three years. Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners were some among the major financing sources.
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How Twitter planned to move further?
Twitter was actually created as a long term investment. The idea behind offering everything free with Twitter was to attract users and to establish the new idea of short messaging service as a monopoly of Twitter.
Twitter was successful in creating 190 million accounts, ( not visitors ) within this short period of time. But many programs like “Revtweet”, started making and sharing money out of Twitter using automated advertisements through active twitter accounts. This created immense automated tweets dumped on most twitter accounts. Regular twitter users went into trouble in identifying useful tweets.
On April 13, 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising for companies such as that would be able to purchase "promoted tweets" to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google ‘Adwords'. This was a brave step to boost the revenue for Twitter.
What could be the killer of Twitter?
Twitter is beleived to have 190 million accounts as of today. Unfortunately 2.1% are dead accounts, 14% fake accounts, 62% irregular login, 12% regular login and 9.9% are one time login (these accounts never opened after they were created-hoping that these accounts may login at any time). This statistics shocked us, and we decided to go for further analysis.
- 2.1% dead accounts, are due to forgetting the password , account deletion due to violation of terms, and physical death of account holder.
- 14% fake accounts are created by Twitter account marketing people to sell Twitter followers. These accounts have no revenue value for twitter.
- 62% irregular login, is due to the influence of other social media networking sites. At the time of its creation, Twitter was not facing any major competition. Twitter spend two years to make Tweeting as a popular action among internet users. Once, Tweeting became popular, then new services like Google Buzz, Google Wave, emerged and Facebook gave more visible importance to short messages. Several other services changed their pattern similar to Twitter. this high competition prevented many real users to stay away from logging into Twitter.
- 12% regular login accounts can be very smaller account number while considering the invested amount on Twitter.
- 9.9% are one time login accounts, in which they fear to use twitter due to privacy leak or less knowledge of irregularly updating Terms and Conditions.
Twitter remained very slow in loading when compared to some other services.
The policy of Following or Unfollowing creating a lot of confusion in account holders.
There is no way of making money with a Twitter account otherwise I had to join in some other programs that may violate the Twitter policies resulting in an account ban.
Lack of more services inside Twitter. Other services like Buzz, Waves and Facebook are offering Short messaging, email, video sharing, picture sharing and much more in a single platform.
10 ideas that could save the life of Twitter
- Keep an account active as long as possible. Never put hard rules and suspend an account on the name of Terms and Conditions.
- Respect privacy of an account holder. Give more privacy options.
- Shift Twitter to new faster loading servers. Establish servers in different countries and establish accounts on local twitter domains.
- Enable Transliteration for more languages that may help Tweeting more funny in local languages.
- Include more services like Email, Games etc that pushes an account holder to login.
- The most important service is a revenue sharing option for an account holder. Twitter may develop a PPC or PPP ( pay per video play) as an advertisement option.
- Enter into an agreement with Google, to display Adsense advertisements in Twitter accounts. Use most possible spaces in a Twitter account. Keep two area to display ads, in which Twitter can display their own advertisement or Twitters Adsense account and in the other allow the account holder to display his/her own Adsense account advertisements. Then share the revenue with the account holder.
- Remove all restrictions in follow or unfollow. Let an account holder to follow or unfollow as many accounts as he wants. This process is similar to a Game, in which a user love to increase his followers. The more he stay in his account, the more Twitter earns.
- Another suggestion is to introduce credit system by setting a Clean Behavior Pattern Credits for users. This will give value to an account, based on the account behaviour in internet. That means this value is derived from number of login, number of followers related to the key word, less spamming , tweeting pattern etc.
- Allow users to sell or but a Twitter account. Clean Behavior Pattern Credits will be the benchmark for estimating value of a Twitter account. Twitter may open an electronic exchange similar to stock exchange where people can sell or buy their own accounts. Transacting through Paypal, Twitter may maintain a pool account for account holders who wish to sell or buy their accounts. Twitter can charge a nominal amount on each transactions.
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2 comments:
This is quite interesting at the same time very shocking. Talking about me, I haven't been much on Twitter as much as I have been on the facebook. Twitter is good..no doubt but certainly needs a lot more tweaking. I really find it very slow in operation. The page takes so much time to load. Anyways, the stats shared by you are very shocking. seems that most of us join it for namesake or just a mere fascination. Well, I am still not certain about it being dead one day as I hope that these things are also being noticed by people behind Twitter and sooner or later, they might be coming up with right ploys to keep away the inevitable dangers. Lets hope for the best...keep writing :)
1. There should be two accounts -
a) pro account where user restrict his account for follow and unfollow.
2. Allow to display Ads like google, facebook ads, clickbank, etc., as well as Twitter own Ads.
Thanks,
Venkat
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