Over the weekend, just before my run, I posted this:
Little did I know that it would stir up such a shit storm. Everyone freaked and called me names. One person complimented me by calling me an elitist capitalist. Yay me!
The whole idea stemmed from Marshall Kirkpatricks post, How Much Would You Pay For Your Twitter Account? His general feeling was that Twitter was worth at least as much as cable TV. In a relatively short time, I’ve been able to establish relationships with people that have turned into friendships, business deals or both. Commission on the deals that I’ve found on Twitter have been much more than $100 per month, so for me the value of Twitter has exceeded that of my cable / internet bill.
My question is could you flip that model around and charge for access to your posts? Before you scoff, think of the type of information that you’d pay for. Not a huge amount of money (initially), but in the range of $1 – $10 per month. Here are some of the suggestions that I got back:
- Favorite bands – Exclusive access to concert tickets
- The same could be used by your favorite sports team
- Industry knowledge – Think Andrew McAfee or Jeremiah Owyang – If you’re in the enterprise / web 2.0 industry
- Financial information – people pay for $1,500 a month for a Bloomberg terminal all the time. What is Motley Fool charging these days?
- Information Services like LexisNexis are insanely expensive. Hoovers, OneSource, etc.
- Celebrity feeds – Not that they need the money, but why not. If Demi Moore could get a buck a month from 10% of her followers, that makes for a nice little $500K residual
- Interactions between people – Howard Lindzon fighting with Jason Calacanis would be worth a $1 a month just to hear the crazy shit that they come up with.
So, if people / companies are paying thousands of dollars per month for access to information that is already days, if not weeks old (with maybe the exception of Bloomberg), why wouldn’t people pay for exclusive access to information that is real time?
Ah, but the retweet…
Yeah, I thought about that. The more I think about the RT, the more I think that Twitter could get in on this with a commerce engine. They take a cut, prevent the RT. Sure, some things will slip through the five hole, but I suspect they could keep it pretty well locked down.
So, what do you think? Would you pay to follow people on Twitter?
How much and what type of people would be worth it?
