Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year
Yes, Twitter will start earning some income this year. — Co-founder Biz Stone said the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has spent most of 2009 building the case for a business product without charging for it. In February, Forbes mapped out what it called Twitter's analytical business plan, betting the company's value to companies lay in the data its firehose of public conversation generates. Since then the usage signals have been mixed but meaningful: an early-August dip in chatter and engagement during the summer lull, offset by Twitter overtaking Facebook as the top link shared in e-mail and a late-July redesign of Twitter.com built around search and discovery for newcomers.
Biz Stone's announcement that commercial accounts enter their first rollout phase this year closes the loop between that data story and an income statement. After a summer that included service disruptions from ongoing attacks and defensive measures that briefly cut off third-party apps — later restored — the company is choosing to monetize the business users who were already treating the free service as infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Businesses get a paid tier offering premium services such as detailed analytics, giving brands their first official measurement layer on top of organic activity they had been tracking through third-party tools.
- Twitter gains its first directly earned revenue stream, ending the stretch in which the company operated with no stated income mechanism.
Second-order effects
- The independent analytics and client ecosystem around Twitter — the same third-party developers who were caught in the platform's recent access restrictions — now competes against features Twitter itself sells, pushing vendors upmarket into services the company does not offer.
- Rival platforms courting the same brand budgets face pressure to match paid business tiers, since marketers favor channels where reach and results come with reporting attached.
Third-order effects
- If commercial accounts hold, consumer platforms' default monetization path shifts toward charging the businesses that extract value from the network while keeping the consumer side free — a structure that shapes how the next generation of social products prices access.
- Analytics sold by the platform itself makes the company the arbiter of its own performance data, raising the longer-term question of whether marketers accept first-party measurement or demand independent verification.
The trend: Consumer social networks in 2009 are beginning to convert unpaid business usage into paid professional tiers, making enterprise customers rather than end users the first source of platform revenue.