Twitter Monetization – Where will the money come from?

I have used Twitter for 6 months, not a long time, although I had heard a lot about it as a representation of micro-blogging for years. But recently I have been really addicted to Twitter especially after Mumbai attacks.

People talked about how fast Twitter broadcast info about the bridge collapsed last year or the earthquake in China this year. But only when the Mumbai attacks happened few weeks ago, I did have a chance to witness the miracle Twitter can do. I followed the news stream updated every second about the attacks as many others all around the world on Twitter. Right after I had found out that Twitter was the best news source at that time to catch latest information in Mumbai, I set up a breaking news page based on Monitter that can display live searching results of some specific keywords from Twitter. For 36 hours, the page reached about 6000 people. I agree with Bernard Lunn on RWW. Twitter’s live search is really good in some cases especially live events like this one.

Nearly at the same time with Bernard, Nick Bilton wrote on O’Reilly Radar about the Twitter Gold mine. He belives that semantic ads would be the key in its incredible business model. But as far as I know, the road ahead will be very long with semantic web. It’s not simple like you tweet: “I want a new car” and you will get recommendations based on what you have tweeeted before. I think recommendation is good but it should be based on need of receivers, not senders. Don’t put useless recommendations everywhere, it would be the same as spam and Twitter will be an ads machine.

It’s not too hard to see value of Twitter and many people have been talking about Twitter monetization. My question is: “where will the money come from?”. Some talked about modifying Twitter platform to something else that can make money but I believe that making money from something built on top of Twitter (or value of Twitter: Real time demonstration, fast propagation, social graph, user experiences,…) is the way. I mean money won’t come from inside Twitter like Display ads, Tweet ads, Search ads,…bla bla (or come but little) but outside and based on the value of Twitter. I know, it’s vague, but I believe, at least now.

The post was written last week and saved as a draft. A week passed and still have no more idea about this so … I just publish the post and keep thinking.