It has been a year since I decided to put my startup Nouncer on hold and join Yahoo!. It has been fascinating to witness Twitter’s renewed media attention and recent growth, and it has inspired me to go back to my old posts about trying to run such a business.
The following are three posts on the subject:
There are 2 main consumer-facing business models: membership fees and advertisements. Fees are nice if you can pull it off, but I doubt anyone is going to see a revenue stream from micro-blogging service
fees anytime soon (Pownce offers bigger files for a fee). If one does it, the others will give it for free. This might change when the competitors have many users to afford giving something for free but then again, you can always count on Google to step in and offer even more for much less. The problem with advertisements is simple – micro-blogging is not web-centric. Most of the time, people use it on other connected devices such as mobile phones, PDA’s, or their instant messaging client...
fees anytime soon (Pownce offers bigger files for a fee). If one does it, the others will give it for free. This might change when the competitors have many users to afford giving something for free but then again, you can always count on Google to step in and offer even more for much less. The problem with advertisements is simple – micro-blogging is not web-centric. Most of the time, people use it on other connected devices such as mobile phones, PDA’s, or their instant messaging client...
Early Thoughts About a Microblogging Business
While archiving the documents used to plan and implement Nouncer, I came across the original document written a little over two years ago (with some minor more recent revisions). It details my service plan, ideas for patents and trademarks, the original name for the service ‘JabAbout’, and a long list of features. It also includes the initial thoughts on the architecture and technical challenges…
Playing with Numbers: A Microblogging Business Model
Building a business out of a microblogging service is not a trivial task. There has been a lot of chatter regarding Twitter’s eventual monetization, but so far the only people who made money off microblogging are the Jaiku founders when they sold the business to Google. I have written before about the difficulty of monetizing microblogging, but difficulty is something to overcome, not a brick wall. This model is an attempt to figure out the different options of running such a business...
