Twitter co-founder Evan Williams yesterday opened up to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington about his revenue plans — details many in the Web 2.0 community have been eager to learn. Even Arrington expressed surprise about how revealing Williams was.
In a transcript of the interview (also in video), Williams says:
The broad strokes on the matter are obviously Twitter is being used for a lot of commercial purposes right now, in addition to social purposes. We think that works pretty well. We think there’s a lot of companies that we’ve talked to that seem to be getting a lot of value out of it. If that continues, if that becomes a rich world for users and the companies, we think we can extract some revenue from that.
And later, a revenue model that seems to suggest Twitter might charge for businesses to promote their specials or answer questions:
One scenario that’s kind of interesting and I’m sure you’ve noticed, [there’s a lot of] questions and answers over Twitter. You combine instant answers and mobility and the fact that people are traveling around me asking a question. Like, “Where should I have dinner in the part of San Francisco?” Or, there are companies now that are sending, they’re little cafes that are sending their lunch specials for today. If you can make that querriable or just allow users to opt-in to receive that kind of stuff …
Other models that Williams discusses: search ads (Twitter confirmed its purchase of Summize yesterday) and traditional ads (which Williams says he’s not really interested in doing).
Twitter has been gaining momentum for several months now and a lot of companies are active there – Southwest, Comcast, Zappos, to name a few. It will be interesting to see how Twitter defines what is a promotional tweet and what is not, and what is a commercial use of Twitter and what is not. If Comcast finds someone complaining about their service on Twitter and offers to help (as it did with Arrington), then should Comcast have to pay Twitter for that?
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