I finally figured out a business model for Twitter. It's advertising based and it only works if Twitter doesn't solve their scaling problems.
The way I see it, the most the Twitter user base needs Twitter to be running smoothly is about fourteen hours a day. That leaves ten hours a day of those cute "please try again later" screens. As long as they can continue to add more people than they lose every day, I could see what I have in mind being a sustainable stream of income. Any large ad network -- like Overture, Federated Media or AOL -- would jump at the chance to get their pool of advertisers in front of this eternally patient, gullible audience.
I totally deserve a Twitter board seat for this.
Comments (40)
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Brian Alvey 1820 days ago
Nice!
I remember Kai Krause (from Kai's Power Tools) joking a long time ago that Photoshop could put ads in the little "Please wait" dialog when running their half hour long filters. This was before there were ads on the web, so probably early 90s.
That joke stuck with me and I wanted to adapt it for Twitter's outages for several weeks now, but I was waiting on getting my redesign out the door.
So it's not 100% original, but the screen shot is. ;-)
Brian Alvey 1819 days ago
Hey, who said those 14 hours are all in a row? ;-)
Brian Alvey 1819 days ago
Hmm...there'd be no user context for this downtime advertising screen, so they wouldn't have to share the money with anyone.
Thanks for pointing out the missing hyperlinks. We just pushed this redesign live a week ago and there are a lot of little things I need to fix, especially in the comments listing, but we're getting there.
Brian Alvey 1819 days ago
I think it's an either/or situation. It's way easier to put ad code on the failure screen than to fix the "unlimited followers, unlimited tweets" problem.
Christopher Finke 1820 days ago
All it needs is a tagline: "Maybe if you clicked on some of these, we wouldn't be down so much."
Dorie 1820 days ago
When I didn't get any tweets on my phone for a while, I took time to log on to the website. I wanted to see if my phone was the problem and I was getting tweets on the account after all. The crash sucked me in. Doesn't mean I would have visited any advertisers, but I logged on.
Daniel G 1821 days ago
That is one of the most genius ideas I have ever heard, monitized down-time :-)
TopOfTheThread 1820 days ago
Good one. It may become and industry standard...
drew olanoff 1820 days ago
Brilliant!!!! That's ads 3.0...monetize your failure!
Pierre-Philippe Martin 1820 days ago
Excellent idea... although I wonder what percentage of Netizen still see adverts at all behind the very efficient Adblock and Flashblock Firefox extensions?
Noah David Simon 1820 days ago
that is funny... but people are already aggravated with downtime as is.
as far as advertising. it might be a better business model for internet porn.
Louis Gray 1820 days ago
I can't claim I was the first one to think of this, but we were discussing the same issue just Friday, only I'd suggested a full page of AdSense.
See here:
http://friendfeed.com/e/5d519875-cd50-df37-785d-b197ea74ac41
Alana Taylor 1820 days ago
Neat, but isn't the whole idea that 80% of users are using the twitter apps/add-ons? These people who are on Twhirl or on their phones won't see these adds. Unless, between tweets on your Twhirl, one of the tweets was an advertisement. I think Twitterific did/does this.
Eric Rice 1820 days ago
Brian wins the internet this weekend. /me claps.
James Skemp 1820 days ago
Here's a brilliant idea: why don't they just charge for the service?
If Twitter is really such a great service, that people can't live without, they'd be willing to drop a few dimes a month to post more than x times a day, right?
Erwood 1820 days ago
Nice try Brian, except that, in the long run, if Twitter keeps on crashing, people will begin to be really annoyed/bored/p... off & go to another more reliable service, like a-Friend Feed or a-Pulse like service.
Jack Carlson 1820 days ago
I once suggested that Windows should show ads on the Blue Screen of Death and that Linux should advertise on their installation screens. Your idea seems like a natural extension of that concept; as long as a company is causing you to stare at the screen for several minutes, monetize that activity.
Matt Harwood 1820 days ago
To those suggesting that twitter charging users is a solution to its problems, I'm afraid if it cannot work out scalability issues with the funding it has at present, my 5 knickers a month won't count for much :-)
As for this post, hillarious!
David Dalka 1820 days ago
Entertaining....one question...would I get a rev share on http://twitter.com/dalka ???
P.S. Your comments without hyperlinks out are lame. :(
MikeonTV 1820 days ago
Brilliant! Whenever Twitter is down run ads on the "broken" page. It's not like they have any ambition to prevent it from breaking anyways.
Jeremiah 1820 days ago
If Twitter began to charge for the service they would have to charge everyone who uses Twitter. If they didn't, non-paying users would end up accuse them of purposely crashing the site for non-paying users to increase subscriptions, and they would just lose out in the long run.
alan wilensky 1820 days ago
All Twitter needs is a brand monitoring web API for allowing the querying of brand and product mentions, and then later, metrics of linguistic markers such as redress and outcomes - but no one listens to me, I'm a nobody.
If they were to put up ads on the error page, they should also caption the page, "&*%$# you, look at some ads and shut up" your friends at Twitter.
Craig 1820 days ago
I hope you're joking. Seriously hope you're just making light of a serious issue facing Twitter - how do you scale without a revenue model? Could you imagine for just a second the visceral response from the Twitter community if for every time they COULDN'T log in they were handed a "sorry we're down, but try this free sample of viagra!"
The easiest way to solve the rev issue is to integrate ad sponsored tweets into the twitter stream and base it on time spent on twitter - similarly as to how Joost integrates ads into content.
It sucks that we have to see ads, but it beats having to pay for the equivalent of free desktop based SMS messaging...
martin english 1820 days ago
I get a bit sick and tired of people pretending to be smart, not realising the web extends across more than 48 states....
So what 14 hours are you gonna pick ? The hours that the europeans are using it ? the hours that the aussies are using it ? what the hours that the japanaese are using (they are apparently still very active on the com version rather than the jp version) ? Apart from the issue of whther I'm using twhirl, slandr or twibble (yes we even have mobile phones down here in Aus)
Kyle Healey 1820 days ago
That's smart and funny at the same time. I wonder if Twitter will ever fix this or perhaps implement your idea? ;)
GJ @acomputerpro 1820 days ago
I've already sent Twitter a book on scaling. Things will be better as soon as they finish reading it. http://is.gd/lKF Give them a year to comprehend it.
chris 1820 days ago
Imagine if somebody could come up with a web2.0 business plan that _didn't_ involve advertising...
And what about the fact that 20% of Twitter users are in Japan? How do you correct for the time diff?
Twitter is quickly becoming a global communications channel. There is no acceptable solution that includes downtime.
Scott Purdie 1819 days ago
I really dont like this idea at all because you are taking advatage of people who love the service, especially at a time when they are irritated, once again. If they need money they could open up a Twitter Pro account, which has been talked about in many blogs, for a small fee per month/year. Its target should be 24 hour uptime - 14 hours will do isnt good enough.
Ben 1819 days ago
That is a smart idea, Brian. Twitter should hire you as a consultant!
Barbara Ling 1819 days ago
Monetized downtime - just like a monetized 404 or Monetized Blue Screen of Death at the airport checkin!
Excellent idea! Must tweet about this.
Enjoy, Barbara
friarminor 1819 days ago
Looks kinda similar to wallpaper/screensaver but beats the blanks during downtimes.
Ok, my take on where to get the 10 hours deduction: base it on location and have default downtimes for time zones.
Lousy me.
alain
Daniele Rossi 1816 days ago
Ugh. The last thing I need on top of a Twitter meltdown is a page full of ads.
Ian Kilpatrick 1816 days ago
Hah! This is genius. Have you told the Twitter folk about it? :)
David Haimes 1816 days ago
This is just like the post office and gas pumps having TVs advertising at me while they make me wait... not that crazy and idea.
Tom Ajello 1777 days ago
Cool, but what could be really awesome is if just one brand sponsored the down time page with something interesting and engaging. "Twitter's down, but here play with this" kinda feel. Twitter stays top of mind and the brand becomes the hero...
The Collection 1769 days ago
Wow! I really like it! Whay you have posted interest me so much...
Anonymous 1820 days ago
@martin english
Wow way to miss the sarcasm of that post. I'd suggest stepping away from that high hobby horse you're riding and go for a walk in the sun. Should cure whatever is up your bum.
Anonymous 1622 days ago
haha SPOT ON mate....further more people get frustrated with ads let alone ads purposely done so u cant connect to twitter...lol
Andy 1655 days ago
The secret Twitter business model eh?
Well this is an old post, but seems like it was way ahead if it's time. Now that there are 3rd parties jumping into the Twitter Ad game we should get to one that's useful.
We have a full featured Twitter Ad Network to display Ads On Twitter that I look forward to letting people behind the curtain next week.
Andy A
Founder
twitAD.com
Walt Ribeiro 1646 days ago
Twitter announced that they may make their money off of giving away the metrics/traffic reports to companies willing to pay. This is a MUCH better business model than the ad based one that ruined Myspace. Great post though. Love your perspective :)