All are wildly popular.
One is profitable.
Two are not.
Twitter received a fair amount of press this week when Twitter CEO, Evan Williams offered, "There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money" (Fox). Twitter isn’t profitable as it could be and the owners are scratching their heads on ways to monetize their popularity without poisoning the traffic. "If you pay attention to it (the hype) too much, you can run yourself off the rails," Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder) said. He added, "Pretty soon, everybody's going to hate us."
Ditto for Facebook. Facebook expects to expand its use of “virtual money” (real money is exchanged for token dollars that are then used to buy gifts, send cards, etc.). Lifting a page from Apple, it’s expected that Facebook will charge for different applications (CNN). Imagine if a dating app could be hardwired to Facebook?
MySpace is popular and profitable. They’ve found a balance between user needs and commercially provided content. Last year, MySpace revenues reached $550 million; powered largely by an interesting partnership with Google search. MySpace TV is second only to YouTube in video usage and, not surprisingly, other Fox sites are brought along for the ride (Wall Street Journal, for example).
For broadcasters, finding the balance between content and commercials is nothing new. The difference here is that the content is user provided and with that comes a sense of entitlement. As radio stations are on the hook to pay artists and publishers for creating revenue from recorded music, should the content providers for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. see a royalty for content created and provided? With Facebook, any content you provide on your profile becomes the property of Facebook. I imagine harsh words would be spoken if getting a song played on a radio station meant transfer of ownership.
A little perspective on this…Twitter has 43 employees and 12 million registered users (18 million by 2010). What if every 100th message received was an ad? What if you could pay to create messages with more than 140 characters? Reports suggest Dell made $1 million using
Twitter, so it’s likely there will be a premium charged for a corporate account. No doubt they’ll figure it out and, in the meantime, nobody is starving. Twitter turned down $500 million from Facebook last year (uh...TwitFace?) and rumours are flying that both Apple and Google are interested.
One is profitable.
Two are not.
Twitter received a fair amount of press this week when Twitter CEO, Evan Williams offered, "There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money" (Fox). Twitter isn’t profitable as it could be and the owners are scratching their heads on ways to monetize their popularity without poisoning the traffic. "If you pay attention to it (the hype) too much, you can run yourself off the rails," Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder) said. He added, "Pretty soon, everybody's going to hate us."
Ditto for Facebook. Facebook expects to expand its use of “virtual money” (real money is exchanged for token dollars that are then used to buy gifts, send cards, etc.). Lifting a page from Apple, it’s expected that Facebook will charge for different applications (CNN). Imagine if a dating app could be hardwired to Facebook?
MySpace is popular and profitable. They’ve found a balance between user needs and commercially provided content. Last year, MySpace revenues reached $550 million; powered largely by an interesting partnership with Google search. MySpace TV is second only to YouTube in video usage and, not surprisingly, other Fox sites are brought along for the ride (Wall Street Journal, for example).
For broadcasters, finding the balance between content and commercials is nothing new. The difference here is that the content is user provided and with that comes a sense of entitlement. As radio stations are on the hook to pay artists and publishers for creating revenue from recorded music, should the content providers for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. see a royalty for content created and provided? With Facebook, any content you provide on your profile becomes the property of Facebook. I imagine harsh words would be spoken if getting a song played on a radio station meant transfer of ownership.
A little perspective on this…Twitter has 43 employees and 12 million registered users (18 million by 2010). What if every 100th message received was an ad? What if you could pay to create messages with more than 140 characters? Reports suggest Dell made $1 million using
Twitter, so it’s likely there will be a premium charged for a corporate account. No doubt they’ll figure it out and, in the meantime, nobody is starving. Twitter turned down $500 million from Facebook last year (uh...TwitFace?) and rumours are flying that both Apple and Google are interested. 20 million registered consumers...nice problem to have.
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