If Twitter has figured out its long-elusive business model, CEO Evan Williams wasn’t spilling the beans at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
“It’s not like we’re spending our days looking in the couch cushions for the elusive revenue model, but obviously we’ve done a lot of thinking about it,” Williams told moderator John Battelle. “I can’t tell you exactly what the model is, but it’s pretty obvious to you that there may be some advertising that makes sense … there’s a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today, there’s a lot of brand marketers who use Twitter today, and it works. We think of Twitter (as) not a social network; it’s an information network … a substantial part of that is commercial and theoretically monetizable information.”
A Two-Pronged Approach?
Such comments, vague as they are, suggest a two-pronged approach to revenue generation. On the one hand, user-focused advertising in an obvious revenue stream, Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said in a telephone interview. “They could certainly do some unobtrusive advertising on Twitter with strategic placement of ads,” he said.
The other prong would be corporate or premium accounts — considering the vast amount of marketing that goes on in Twitter. “I can imagine analytics or some type of advanced data features. There’s probably a range of things they can do there, maybe tie these accounts more broadly to other services,” Sterling said. “Certainly, the idea of a premium account has been talked about for some time.”
Williams also promoted a new feature, Lists, currently in limited beta, which lets users seek out interesting — or at least famous — people to follow. Users can subscribe to lists, while list creators can manage who can follow the list.
The feature is expected to replace the widely despised…