Twitter’s Business Model?

Perhaps the biggest question facing Twitter is how it’s going to make money.

At the Web 2.0 Summit – somehow the word “Summit” seems over the top, eh! – Twitter CEO Biz Stone said the enterprise market looks like a good opportunity for Twitter to do some monetization (aka make some dough-ray-me).

“There is commercial value, not just personal value” to Twitter, and if there’s commercial value we can really deliver on…then I don’t think it’s going to be hard to monetize that.”

It is interesting that Stone also said the lack of revenue at this point “is not as big of a dilemma as people think it will be for us”, and that Twitter will not insert advertising into Twitter – even though startups (upstarts) such as Magpie have no problem doing it.

“I think advertising, as most people think of it, is more and more a different proposition, the whole idea (that) we’re going to insert some message along with the content you actually want, and hope you’ll be interested in that as well.”

The big question is by not doing advertising, which I see as a no-brainer if done properly, how much money is Twitter leaving on the table? My sense is a lot.

Source: CNet. For more on Stone’s Web 2.0 Summit appearance, check out Contentinope (a great name, by the way!)

Update: Webware has a list of 11 possible business models for Twitter. I particularly like “Sell plush Fail Whales”.

Technorati Tags: biz stone, web 2.0 summit

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