Twitter is one of the most powerful forces in the world which plays a critical role in defining corporate and political upheavals of our era like Donald Trump as president of the US and the Arab Spring and the election of a political outsider.
Twitter contributes to our routine conversations, in connecting us with family and friends as well as political debates via links of news articles and academics and nonprofit studies.
The unique aspect of Twitter is the dichotomy between this valuable role in connecting people and its ongoing lack of profitability. Twitter’s net loss in the fourth quarter of the year 2016 was $167 million, and for 2017, the company announced plans to gain profitability, through staff cuts.
Many believe that by layoffs mortgage the company’s future generates revenues by cutting sales force. After writing a book in 2009 while arguing that growing economic inequality would lead to dangers for politics and economy’s health.
Since it is found, Twitter has evolved dramatically, I guess Twitter’s founders never envisioned corporate accounts with millions of followers but they set out to create a service that would connect people with each other in the world.
We just know that many business entities have millions of services and products this is advertising free of ifs, ands, and buts.
Here is a proposal to change the economics of Twitter radically, by charging businesses that exceed a set number of followers (which is perhaps 250,000) a monthly fee based on their total strength of followers.
Here are the follower counts for a cross-section of well-known brands to provide a sense of scale:
1)@TeslaMotors 1.4 million
2)@Verizon 1.7 million
3)@Pepsi 3.1 million
4)@CocaCola 3.4 million
5)@McDonalds 3.4 million
6)@Intel 4.7 million
7)@Marvel 4.9 million
8)@GoogleChrome 6.1million
9)@SamsungMobile 12.1 million
10)@Google 17.6 million
Most of these businesses are suspected of spending large sums of planning and developing their Twitter activities -a form of advertising that gives value, with no portion going to Twitter. It would not be wrong for Twitter to capture through fees, some economic value its service brings companies?
This change might have not Twitter’s bottom line to assess the potential magnitude.
Centra reason for Twitter’s profitability issue is that it has been far too good a deal for a huge number of advertisers.
And this is not illegal. Nothing in this idea of revenue is unlawful.
How to do it?
Take a worst case as an example that assumes under the applicable law, Twitter user corporations have the same rights as people. Define these charges as advertising fees on any Twitter user who have more than 250,000 followers.
Secondly, discount for different types of advertisers are too legal, which will result in the form of exemption from these fees of nonprofit entities.
Finally, the group presenting significant issue are celebrities.
I believe in the issue of category and the movie stars, athletes, authors, and musicians should be members of the group.
The alternative scenario is…
Assume corporations do not have the same rights as people. Twitter can exempt all the members from charges. And can require corporations to pay advertising fees on the basis of their volume of followers.
Adding the value for corporate users:
A small piece of the large revenue increase Twitter could take and create services to add additional value for this paying, huge range of corporate users.
New services though not necessary, may be valuable:
Twitter has based its path to profitability in recent years on service enhancements designed to increase user engagement. And a transformation into media consumption platform.
