Last year I asked @Ev to let me pay him $20 a month/$250 a year for a Twitter Pro account which was on its own uber-redundant server cluster. Evan's response was it wasn't a cost issue but a software issue.
However, I still think there is a huge market--perhaps 1-5% of the twitter base--that would pay for a professional account. If 1% of 10m users would pay this fee you are looking at 100k paid users. At $250 a year each that is $25m a year in revenue.
That's a lot of servers and developers.
@ev @jack: I'd think about.
Twitter Pro -- one year later, same request: take my money for less down time
Recent Posts
- New of the Day - August 27 2008 (8/27/2008)
- News of the day - August 26 2008 (8/26/2008)
Reader Comments
(Page 1 of 1)2. I don't have a whole lot of money, but I would gladly pay for a twitter pro account.
Posted at 8:33PM on May 23rd 2008 by Michelle
3. where do I send the cheque Jason?
Also in my case our product twitterfone would pay a per month fee for access to the API and guaranteed uptime I think this would sort the men from the boys on twitter apps also
Posted at 8:41PM on May 23rd 2008 by Pat Phelan
4. I love Twitter, but I certainly can't see myself spending $20 a month on it (or my wife letting me spend that on it, even :P). I might pay a Flickr-like $25 a year, which could still build a healthy revenue stream because you'd attract more customers. It's like lemonade stand.
Posted at 8:54PM on May 23rd 2008 by Josh Holloway
5. 10m users? Twitter has about 1.5 users (http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/2008/05/15-million-twitter-users.html) and likely less than half those are active. Best case scenario, there's ~600k active users. 1% of 600k is 6k users who might pay for a pro service. So we're talking about $1.5m. Still a nice chunk of change, but nowhere near $25m.
6. I gladly pay for Flickr and would be happy to pay for a Pro Twitter account. I'm not sure I could justify $20/mo but most people who would pay for it could probably justify $5/mo easily to pay for a better level of service.
Posted at 9:19PM on May 23rd 2008 by Chris Harrison
7. The Second after Twitter goes pay to play, Friendfeed becomes the place to be...
Posted at 11:31PM on May 23rd 2008 by solacetech
8. I don't think it will help because their issue will not be cleared up overnight. And you will have upset paying customers. They need to fix their code to scale and properly handle messaging as they pointed out in their blog. I think at this point their priority should be finding funding to fix their code then attack monetization.
9. What exactly is it you're asking for? A dedicated server for corporate use that has a specific paid for and limited number of users? Or a dedicated server for all of your 26,000+ followers? One person pays for them all?
If you don't sponsor the server for all users, and your regular followers or friends have to pay too, you're potentially disconnected part of the time from most people who won't agree to pay at all.
And once you've created a 2 class system, how do those feel that are faced with downtime and think they're being coerced into paying in order to communicate with the upper class?
You can't build a business model around paying people to not have a broken service some of the time. That's the Mafia's job.
Posted at 12:38AM on May 24th 2008 by Joost Schuur
11. I think the simplest and easiest way to open up revenues would be to charge for SMS delivery. The first X are free, after that, you pay $10 / $20 / $50 a month for a block of SMSs.
If Twitter start accepting money from users, they have to guarantee service levels, and they'll have a shitstorm of complaints when things go wrong. Creating two networks doesn't work, because who cares if the "free" network goes down? So they'd have to make sure their whole network doesn't go down, just so they don't get complaints from their paying users. It's a good long term strategy, but it'll be a nightmare in the short term.
14. Simple, Smart and hopefully not so smart they dont consider it!
Great post and a great idea
Scott
Posted at 8:24AM on May 24th 2008 by Scott Purdie
15. If Twitter had the design quality of Alert Thingy and was reliable you might get $20.00 ,but you have to build a case to subscribers defining benefits !
Posted at 10:33AM on May 24th 2008 by marshal sandler
17. $20 a month? Methinks you are out of touch with what people would consider acceptable. $20 a month to play in a sandbox full of some extremely annoying people who live in San Francisco?
How about decentralizing the architecture and opening it up to outside developers. We have something like this already, it could use XMPP and something similar to a widely distributed network of Jabber servers.... But, wait, we're all supposed to find a way for some idiots on the West Coast to make a few million off the idea?
Posted at 10:18AM on Jun 1st 2008 by Tim O'Brien
18. Would you pay for Twitter? No you wouldn't. I refuse to believe that, in a channel where the logical end cost of everything is zero, you'd pay for a service just because your friends/contacts/whatever are there.
Someone else would provide portability tools and undercut, and be undercut ad infinitum until the cost was zero with an ad-supported model.
I pay for MS Excel and gladly do so but Google is very close to the tipping point where they have 20% of Excel functionality which covers 80% of Users. For free. And I can import my historical work. Maybe a bad example but I think it still applies.
Posted at 12:07PM on Jun 2nd 2008 by Colin Bruce
19. Hi Jason,
I am SO LATE! lol! However, better late than never!
Twitter's issues are SO NOT MONEY Problems. They are rolling in money. They just received $15M in end of May for development from private investors. They have a lot of interest from private investors and investment firms.
It is a software/server issue. Twitter exploded in growth in a short time and they just haven't caught up yet. Development takes longer than 100 people creating a twitter account and starting to tweet. Myspace had similar issues when their growth suddenly exploded exponentially.
It is hard to plan for this, since you never know when it will hit or how much volume. Twitter is doing much better now than a month ago. And they have make 99% of the fixes without taking the service down.
I'm curious to see what the next phase of twitter will be. They are going to have monetize something, and it is likely all planned out. Investors don't dump 15M into a fun microblog site so thousands can chat with eachother.
Soon all will be revealed!
In Prosperity and Success!
Amy
1. I'd listen to this guy.
Posted at 8:33PM on May 23rd 2008 by avin