Twitter to Sell 50% of All Tweets for $360k/Year Through Gnip
Twitter announced today a new partnership with social data streaming service Gnip at the Defrag Conference outside of Denver: Gnip will offer 50% of all the messages posted to Twitter for $360,000 per year, or 5% of all messages for $60,000 per year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gnip's arc runs from infrastructure plumbing to licensed reseller: after raising $3.5 million in November 2008 to solve the problem of 'data unclogging' across social APIs, it is now Twitter's commercial channel, offering half of all tweets for $360,000 per year or 5% for $60,000 per year, unveiled at the Defrag Conference outside Denver.
The deal lands in a busy stretch for Twitter: it began inviting a select group of users to test an official analytics product that an executive had promised would debut by the end of 2010, pushed instant notifications, promoted its role supporting newsrooms through co-founder Biz Stone, and integrated with Apple's Ping — with the company reporting over 95 million tweets per day as the raw material Gnip will now meter out.
First-order effects
- Enterprises and researchers gain a priced, contract-based route to large volumes of Twitter messages without negotiating directly with Twitter, while Gnip converts its 2008 data-pipeline investment into a recurring six-figure-per-customer revenue line.
- Twitter establishes a second business line alongside advertising: selling access to its message stream at published tiers rather than giving the full flow away.
Second-order effects
- Analytics and social-media-monitoring vendors must decide whether to buy through Gnip's tiers or build their own licensed relationships, making Gnip the gatekeeper that sets the market's reference price for tweet volume.
- Other social platforms with large message volumes face pressure to formalize their own paid data-licensing programs, since a rival platform has demonstrated that buyers will pay six figures annually for partial stream access.
Third-order effects
- If tiered licensing holds, social data hardens into a structured resale market with intermediaries sitting between platforms and end customers — turning user-generated content into a priced commodity asset rather than a free API byproduct.
- The arrangement foreshadows platforms consolidating control over their data distribution: what begins as a partnership with an intermediary positions the platform to reclaim or reprice the channel on its own terms.
The trend: Social platforms are shifting from open, free API access toward tiered commercial data licensing sold through specialized intermediaries like Gnip, converting public message streams into recurring revenue.