Monetizing Twitter
I’ve been on the Twitter bandwagon as an investor for a little over a year. After the stock cratered to $26 a share I thought it was cheap, at under $17 it’s a steal. Yes it has problems, no it’s not Facebook, but it is a uniquely invaluable service that fills a niche no one else does. Where Instagram is exploding in growth by having polished the features that Snapchat pioneered, Twitter is still the place where influential people share thoughts and great conversations happen out in the open.
I’ve followed so many discussions about how Twitter needs to find a buyer or that they need to bounce Trump off the network, or 15 other very non specific ways to increase growth. But when it comes down to it, Twitter already has been forging down the right path over the last year, but there are a few things that are blatantly hanging out in the open that will boost their revenue significantly with their current MASSIVE user base.
‘MASSIVE’ user base Chad? Yes…MASSIVE. One of the measurements that needs to be thrown out the window is Monthly Active Users(MAU) or Daily Active Users(DAU) that define Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. Twitter is a news service, not a social network. It is however a social news service which makes each and every user a reporter, and that is its unique power. News services on public stations like ABC, NBC, and CBS do not get measured by how many subscribers they have, they are measured on how many eyeballs see their news and are shown ads. This is where Twitter is the 800 pound gorilla hiding in plain sight. Whether or not you have a Twitter account, when was the last time you went a day without seeing a Tweet embedded on an article you read?
Exactly.
If Twitter officially released how many unique individuals saw their content on a monthly basis, I’m sure it would be somewhere north of a billion people…and that’s Facebook territory. The problem is, how do you monetize people that are viewing your content off site?
With Twitter Moments.
Let me provide some background. One of the issues with Twitter is that people can’t complete a thought in 140 characters, so they often spew out what is known as a Tweet Storm. This is a series of Tweets that the author either just fires off one after another, or sometimes numbered to distinguish beginning and endings of a thought. With Twitter’s new Reply To feature, people now seem to make an initial Tweet then Reply to themselves which is a bit of an ugly hack. But I digress… Twitter Moments was created as a way to curate these Tweets that seem to live on an island by themselves and string them together as a collection. A Moment can be a series of one person’s Tweets, or a conversation that is happening about a topic or between Twitter Users.
For the past year, Twitter employees have created these Moments. The obvious problem with this is that a small group of people are creating what they think is news for the entire Twitter user base. I have constantly bitched openly that I would like to see Moments created for techies like me, but to no avail. Yet every day, hundreds if not thousands of sites across the web are embedding individual tweets on their sites and selling ads that Twitter doesn’t get one red cent for.
So the problems Twitter needs to solve are:
- Moments are a pain to create
- Moments are not being monetized
- Twitter is providing content for free to over a billion people monthly
I’ve developed a solution to each point that I believe could be implemented fairly quickly and significantly increase Twitter’s revenue overnight.
Moments are a pain to create
Do you know why Snapchat and Instagram exploded with popularity? They each lowered the barrier to entry on content creation. Snapchat’s app opens directly into the camera whereas Facebook places me in the News Feed. Instagram makes your dull photos beautiful with one click. Twitter makes it easy to share very short thoughts, but if I want to say anything of real value, the UI breaks my ability to do so as I stated above.
As a quick side thought, this has been a complaint of Twitter Users for a long time. People have been asking for the ability to create longer Tweets while others say doing so is blasphemy. But giving user the ability to craft longer thoughts is very very valuable.
Quick Fix: Let the user create as long as a thought as they want within the input screen, but break each 140 characters into its own Tweet.
This allows someone to write and curate their thoughts into multiple Tweets quickly, but more importantly, Tweets submitted together should automatically become a Twitter Moment and shown in the feed as such. We’re allowing users to create medium to long form media while staying pure to the service.
Moments are not being monetized
This one I simply do not get. Moments are full screen content and each Moment has ad inventory located right there at the end. Snapchat and Instagram are both monetizing this heavily and successfully using this format. Ads can be full screen portrait videos, the holy grail of mobile advertising.
Twitter is providing content for free
This one is understandably a hard problem to solve. You want Tweets to be easily embeddable so publishers will do so and each Tweet viewed off site is free advertising for Twitter. But lets be a little clever and monetize embedded Tweets while making the publisher money in the process shall we? Enter Embedded Moments! Now that we’ve made it simple for influencers to create Twitter Moments and we’ve figured out how to monetize them, let’s make monetized Moments embeddable!
There’s one little problem…
Twitter removes our wonderful ad inventory when a Moment is an Embedded Moment by breaking a Moment’s Tweets out individually as a feed. No problem, that’s a quick fix. Make embeddable Moments look exactly like a normal native mobile Moment and we get our ad inventory back. Now publishers can embed a Twitter Moment containing a few or more Tweets while earning a slice of the ad revenue seen by each of their readers.
I dare say Twitter’s valuation could double within the year if they implemented the above suggestions, but I won’t because that would be arrogant.
