Twitter's Revenue Model

Few days back, the number tweets exceeded the world population.
Also Twitter got to know about a recent small earthquake faster than the local media could get to know about it.
They have 70million users and they’ve grown 1300 odd% in a year.
But yet they don’t have a revenue model and don’t make any money.
So here are a few things I think they can do to become profitable.

• Divide the screen space and display ads.
  This is a tough one as people like Twitter for its simplistic view. But still there is a lot of screen space they can utilize. They can probably divide the page and on one side are the ads related tweets. These tweets can have graphical content which will stand out in comparison to the text based tweets. To tweet here ( lets call it b-tweets) you need to pay something to Twitter. They could charge you per tweet or per month with a usage limit or for the data content. Put in a lot of options which will give a lot of choice for businesses.
  


• Customized feeds.
  Twitter should ask people if they would like to subscribe for customized feeds of they're interests. Something like Yahoo does when you sign up, they ask you to check your interests. There would some people who would check for something which would make a portion of the users not complain about ads since they asked for it. Of course others like us should have the option of not getting any ads on our personal area.
  


• Communities/ Fan clubs
  Twitter should also have this thing like fans/communities where people with similar interests could have conversations. I think since Twitter is so open, there is no directions to the tweets; which is nice in a way but people should be able to direct it if they want to. Twitter could charge businesses for starting these communities to give people info about their product/services.
  


• Strike a deal with GOOGLE
  Also Twitter can strike a deal with Google and allow Google to access their site for real-time searches. This works for Google as well as they need to combat Facebook on the real time search front.(btw It takes a Facebook with 360mil users and Microsoft to take on Google and Google still rocks!!!)

I still haven’t given this much thought; I need to come up with more points.

KILLER APPLICATIONS THAT GOOGLE SHOULD COME UP WITH

• A much awaited “G Drive” where you can just drag and drop onto your Online Storage device. Pretty much like Microsoft’s Sky drive, only a lot cooler as it is by Google.



• An “OFFICE G” to replace MS office.



• A “MEDIA G” software which plays audio and video in all formats, searches for related media info and updates the files. For e.g.: it should be able to search for the subtitle track for movie file. Also with handheld music players becoming popular, MEDIA G also sorts the music and updates info such as genre, year, artist etc so that it’s easy to use on your “G POD”.
  
  
• A G POD.



• A "G MONEY” for people to manage their personal finances. This is pretty simple yet necessary. I don’t know why Google hasn’t done something about it yet.
  BUY FACEBOOK, not just delete Orkut but Shift Delete it.



• Google handsets to go with Android with limited ads on your mobile if you go in for the subsidized version of the phone.



• Finally a Google OS that’s awesome enough to make Microsoft and Apple go out of business.