A couple of weeks back, Twitter named Kevin Thau as the person whose task it is to finally bring the money home for the popular micro blogging tool. It had earlier advertised an opening for this position ending months of talk on how it plans to monetize its business.
Now one of the most popular application of Twitter is its search feature which earlier went around as Summize and was smartly acquired by Twitter last year. It was instantly linked to as Twitter service and re-christened as Search.Twitter.com. Summize before being taken over by Twitter faced relative competition from the likes of TweetScan, but with mother adoption by Twitter has essentially pulled the pluf on such services, with most Twitter users (which is growing in numbers every week) most likely to use the search function on their twitter pages. Even popular third party devices like Twhirl used Summize as their search backend and given they use Twitter’s API the future apps are also likely to use Twitter search rather than a separate search service.
Interestingly, it is TweetScan which provides the model of revenue that is possible for Twitter. It uses a monetization method similar Google’s Ad words. The primary monetization tool being Text Link boxes limited up to 140 characters. They also have banner ads solutions which kind of makes the site congested, but the link boxes are very much a microblogging solution. So while Tweetscan has moved beyond Twitter to even integrate Identi.ca to its fold of searches, Twitter can perhaps look at the text link model on searches as a major monetization tool.
In fact coming to think of it, search.twitter.com makes it a perfect candidate for a Google acquisition as well. What Mr. Kevin Thau and the two other people who will come to fill in the vacant slots (Product manager and Strategic Alliances) do to make some money for Twitter certainly seems interesting. Will it go the Google way..or will Google become its way remains to be seen.
I like this….dude I like the foresight and insight and the hindsight you put into articles
Very interesting idea of monetization, but I think Twitter guys want to go the Google way
in context, check out something i’d written a while back http://www.manuprasad.com/?p=1160
and check out http://adcause.com/ (via http://mashable.com/2009/01/23/adcause)
Thanks guys..
@manu saw the new layout for the blog today.. looks good and I had read about adcause, I don’t know why didn’t quite get kicked about it.. advertising on one’s lifestream doesn’t quite seem right