£12 a year on Twitter? Vote!
| April 29th, 2008
Just a thought, but if everyone who used Twitter regularly paid £1 per month for the privilege, then Twitter would get get £2.4 million ($4.7 million) a year. And that’s based on the stats from Techcrunch that claim 200,000 active users and 1 million registered users, so if anything that figure is low.
The current growth rate is massive too so six months down the line, who knows what that figure might look like.
Or another way of looking at it is to charge 1p per message sent on Twitter (3 million are sent every day apparently) and rake in £10.95 million ($21.6 million) a year. This would work out to be £4.65 ($9.17) per month though to a user sending 15 tweets a day, which again is apparently the average amongst the 200,000 active users. That feels too much, but really probably isn’t given what you actually get compared to other stuff on the web - think of the costs of the texts alone. £1 mind . . .
So, rather than chuck ads at me or think of another way to monetize the service just ask me up front and I’ll pay. I’m sure others would too.
Anyway, just a quick not very well researched thought initiated by this I think . . . but if I do hand over the money, please Twitter can you make sure it works and pretty please look after my data. Thanks.
Would you pay £12 a year to use Twitter? Vote below or here
[Photo Credit - starring Skipper]
Surely subscription isn’t the way forward?!? Friends Reunited messed up by going the subscription route when they should have gone down the advertising one.
Maybe. My thought was would you rather pay £1 per month or look at ads either in an app, on the site or (even worse) tweeted to you amongst all your other tweets (I think Twitteriffic used to do that) . We all love Twitter and whinge like crap when it goes down. We expect it to work all the time and are frustrated because it doesn’t do loads of stuff we want it to. But, we want it to be free and wouldn’t pay £1 a month for using it. Problem is, with an open API, not sure how they can do the ad thing - so just asking people to pay for access might be an option? And one that people might be up for in exchange for an ad free, 100% reliable fully functional Twitter? I don’t know the answer but I’m sure I’ll have an opinion when we know ! PS good to see you yesterday at Internet World.
Good to see you too. I wouldn’t have thought Twitter cant physically go the ad route either. Time will tell!
Twitter’s impact and reach is becoming too pervasive for the clock to be turned back. People will demand something like Twitter, if Twitter itself cannot deliver. If people see value they will pay. If they want the service without ads they will pay. If Twitter can scale effectively, they may have no option but to introduce a subscription model if they want to monetize their technology.