Why You Should Want to Pay for Twitter

From Zanecorpwiki

One: A business does not survive without profit.

Two: Whoever pays for a thing controls the thing.

A business is what makes it's profits, no matter what people say. Microsoft does not make their money at innovation, they make their money by monopolizing the Desktop OS and office markets. That's precisely why they're good at monopoly and suck at innovation. MySQL isn't a database company, they're a software support company. It's why they have (I assume) decent support and a sub-par product. Microsoft puts their money into monopoly, not innovation. MySQL puts their money into support, not their development. Microsoft does do some innovation, and MySQL obviously does develop their product, but these are ancillary activities precisely because it's not where they make their money.

Now, onto the land of Free Things. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Most of these are advertising companies. Social networks are just the work they have to do to get ads in front of people. Maybe it's not what they want to be. It's probably not what they think they are. But it is what it is, and if your company makes money selling ad space, guess what, you're an ad company.

I believe that Twitter wants to be different. Listening to the founders and investors talk about searching for a business model, letting it evolve, and even talking about ads, it's pretty clear they'd rather not do ads. Thinking about how Twitter works and why it's popular, it's hard to see how they emcould/em do ads even if they wanted to.

If I were cynical, I'd say the latter caused the former, but really I think it's simpler than that: Twitter is cool, and wants to stay cool. Ads are not cool.

Twitter has another problem: high expectations. Everyone knows Twitter is the bees knees. All the Cool Kids from the Valley are involved with Twitter, so anything less than a highly profitable business model that's also cool runs the risk of being perceived as a failure and diminishing the Twitter magic.

So what then? What crazy scheme is there that will make Twitter the money it (eventually) needs to make to keep going, but still keep it free? I think analytics of some kind is going to be part of it. The only question I have is why don't we hear about that? I actually think analytics are slightly cool. My guess is that being a magical service that makes no money but still is is cooler so they're going to milk it for all they can and give themselves as much time as possible to put together partnerships, technology, and a public spin that maximizes the effect of the announcement of their business model when they finally get around to it. For the reasons I lay out here, I hope that it'll include pay for premium services with analytics supporting the free side of freemium. Pure analytics would be unexpected because you really want multiple revenue streams, and I just don't think it would be enough.

Everyone talks like they're working on something absolutely magical that somehow transcends money, but at the end of the day, that's silly. You can get a free ride from suckers with money, but the great truth of life is this: either you run out of suckers or the suckers run out of money. Some investors may be suckers, but I suspect most aren't. If anything Twitter's just trying to figure out how to make a perfectly mundane and predictable business model sound magical so they can retain their mystique even after descending reality.

Plus, I believe, and hope, that part of that business model includes paid features. There's a real cultural problem there, though. No one wants to be the first to charge for their services. We like simple answers and clear culprits, so in a few years when people ask, Hey, whatever happened to everything being free? The answer will be, Well, it all started when Some Company that Will Live in Infamy started charging... That one will be knows as the one that destroyed the Impossible Dream of Free (Beer). Baring some miracle, they all know it's coming but no one wants to be the first. It's just a giant game of chicken to see who'll blink (i.e., run out of investor money) first.

And I think it'll be a great thing. Twitter won't suck because it's fubar'ed with ads, it'll just cost a little money or have some freemium thing going. Crossing my fingers, it'll give them an excuse to clean some shit up and make it even better. I wish the ad-supported sites I visit would emlet/em me pay them instead of foisting ads on me and then sucking because ads don't pay for shit anymore.