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David Mullings

10 months ago

in Twitter’s Path to Monetization: Copy Meebo on Social Times
That is definitely an interesting business model and they should pursue that.

However, advertising is not the obvious business model. Today I posted at FastCompany (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/david-mullings/...) that they have 3 better options:

(1) Offer Users Value-added Services - Worpress already does this and the model is easy to adapt. Their blog software is free but you can purchase add-ons. I am sure that Twitter can come up with value-added services users will want.

(2) Charge marketers/brands/advertisers to use Twitter - I pay a monthly fee to manage my email list through a provider (most programs charge per user or by the quantity of messages). Zappos uses Twitter, see Inc. magazine's Zappos Finds a Use for Twitter. Really!, and many other companies use Twitter to quickly communicate with their biggest fans. I even use Twitter for Realvibez, tweeting about new videos uploaded to the site, news and blog posts. I would gladly pay a fee to be able to get valuable insight information on my tweets - how many read and so forth - plus be able to use such a great communications channel.

(3) Focus groups - I have seen Twitter used for focus group research and would gladly pay
Twitter to manage such a focus group for me. I will provide the
question and the account to tweet a reply to, Twitter can choose who to
send it to based on profile information.

10 months ago

in Primary Monetization Model for Social Media: Advertising on Social Times
Nice post. I definitely agree that these VC-backed ventures have less time than they realize.

However, I disagree that "building more inventory doesn’t seem to make much sense." That has to be qualified.

Building the SAME inventory as everybody else makes no sense but building QUALITY inventory that is different does.

Facebook has focused on users but it also has amazing amounts of data that can lead to behavioral targeting (all the rage now) or psychographic targeting, not just demographics or an assumed audience.

You are quite right that most web ventures are focused on creating more of the same inventory, hence the atrocious cpms they receive.

Quality always wins over Quantity
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