As only Simon Dumenco can, Twitter gets yet another lashing from an unbeliever. While Dumenco may be a non-believer, not one to drink the cult’s Kool-Aid, he a makes a few good points. Twitter was launched in 2006 and still has yet to institute a business model steering the company towards anything more than its current status as plaything for social media-obsessed digerati.
While Twitter has said and continues to say it has every intention of creating a business model which will support it beyond seed money, reading the revenue-generating notion “one idea is to charge companies th at want to use Twitter as an official channel to talk with their customers and monitor what they are saying,” causes one to ROFLOL to the point of gut-busting pain.
Charge companies? Charges companies? For what? Any company with half a brain already has access to an endless supply of free “listening” tools that offer fairly deep insight into Twitter usage and what’s being said about a particular brand.
Dumenco concludes not so inappropriately, writing, “I don’t think every tweet or blurp or bloop or fart that emanates from a human can or should have ads sold against it or be otherwise monetized.”
Of course, Dumenco needs to realize Twitter is far more than a listing of every “blurp or bloop or fart that emanates from a human.” Far more.
And there’s one simple solution to solving Twitter’s monetization woes; keep advertisers out and charge people an annual fee to use the service. This will keep Twitter from becoming horribly tainted with commercialism and it will reduce the amount of unnecessary blurps. bloops and farts from people with nothing better to do than to tweet, “just got up. heading to the shower. big day ahead.”
