Twitter PLUS
Jason Calacanis touched on the subject last year and has again written on the subject tonight.
“Last year I asked @Ev to let me pay him $20 a month/$250 a year for a Twitter Pro account which was on its own uber-redundant server cluster. Evan’s response was it wasn’t a cost issue but a software issue.
However, I still think there is a huge market–perhaps 1-5% of the twitter base–that would pay for a professional account. If 1% of 10m users would pay this fee you are looking at 100k paid users. At $250 a year each that is $25m a year in revenue”
Seriously where do I pay, right now I would click the Paypal link. I think Jason may be a little out on pricing though, how about a buck per user per week for guaranteed uptime plus a fee per month for use of the API which our product Twitterfone uses.
I am keen not to harp on the guys regarding the reliability but I am sure the income would help to build out the engineering team quicker which in turn would stabilize the product.
What do you think? do you love twitter enough to go PLUS?
44 comments...What do you think?
Trackbacks...
- A Few Reasons “Twitter Pro” is a Bad Idea | Jeremiah Hoyet
- CISNKY » links for 2008-05-24
- Twitter: Show Me Added Value if You Want Me to Pay | Verge New Media
I’d definitely be up for paying a small fee weekly, if they could guarantee uptime!
God, totally. I would even stretch to Jason’s pricing. PLEASE DO THIS, Twitter.
I’d definitely spring for a buck a week on a pro account. Stability is where Twitter sadly falls down atm. Scaling is the issue, as opposed to other microblogging services that are deserted. If a buck a week helps roll out the service and guarantee uptime for me, I’d pay it.
I would only pay if it cost somewhere around what flickr charges. 25 dollars a year. Any more than that is too much. And then you have to worry about angry users when the service inevitably goes down again. How would you sell it? “Pay us and we’ll give you service that actually works”, that’s silly.
I would pay €20 a year for uptime and to allow me arrange the people I follow and maybe group sending option or even a shortcode system too
No way. I guess I’m just not as vain as some. Who cares if Twitter is up? Do you really like to hear yourself tweet that much?
Plus, $20/month must have been thought of after an extensive crack-smoking session. $20/year is about what it is worth.
I could see paying $10 a month. Its another way to be connected but I am still paying a phone bill and a Internet bill and a air card; so $25 would seem a little steep just to make sure I have one more connexion.
I agree, I would definitely pay for a twitter pro account if it gave me additional features/stability.
I’m not sure if $20 a month is a viable price model, but I do think a yearly subscription would be much better. I’d easily pay $30-40 a year if twitter just worked.
I think what the majority of the community wants is software that just works and is very useful. Twitter right now is useful, but the stability issues are annoying at best.
Um 250 is a bit much. I’d pay 60 bucks a year. Calacanis says its how he stays connected? More like how he spams everyone with stupid links to flickr about his dogs and forces ppl to comment…
Interesting. The folks that would do that would likely be ones that use it somewhat professionally (Calacanis and Scoble come to mind). What they’d effectively being doing is paying for a first-to-see guaranteed wire service of “noise” (as Scoble calls it). And without the need to fall back on FriendFeed twice a day. But once their scaling problems are solved, then what do they do with the money? Their key is in the simplicity… FriendFeed is in the complexity (now with rooms!). And why wouldn’t they extend that perfect uptime commitment to all users — if it’s there, it’s there.
I think this strategy is flawed. If there is a downtime and 95-99% of users can’t update nor read our updates, then what good is it if we are still online?
It might be better as a business model to insert advertisements, and charge users a nominal fee to NOT see the advertisements.
There’s no return for that $20 and increased reliability. Say you have 1,000 followers, and only 10 of them have paid accounts, what’s the point in paying $20 a month for that?
I wouldn’t pay that much a month for Twitter. I might consider paying something smaller, either it be say $25 for a year or $3-$5 a month possibly. But thinking many $20/$250 a year is crazy with the way prices are today, I could then live without twitter pro account and stick free.
I would totally go for Flickr-priced yearly “subscription”.
One way to sell this would be by removing all the performance-related API limitations for subscribers - the update rate limit, friends timeline history and all that. The only people who would care most about twitter uptime would also care for those, and only the former can be dealt with if you go ask the twitter folks with a legitimate request.
I would pay what Burkie said, 20 euros or about $40 a year. It would be great and the Twitter team could seriously use the funding to get their shit straight. Hopefully they’ll hear us if we make enough “noise”.
it’s an east for them to monetize the site.
the question for me is if twitter continues to grow at the current pace, will they even be able to provide a reliable service for the free users let alone the premium ones.
I would not be against paying 5-10 bucks a month to take advantage of a more reliable service. which after this week alone of downtime is something to be thinking about.
I just keep waiting for more news from twitter about future plans and overall reliability if service.
either way I love what we got here and can only hope fur more great stuff to come.
Those that run it would have to solve the uptime issue, but I definitely would pay towards that end.
The problem is…
If your Twitter would be up, but other people couldn’t post, what’s the point of having a pro account?
I am now making a Twitter client that would be up even if Twitter goes down, but you would only be able to see updates from users using our client. This would be great for exchanging direct messages IM-style, but not for the Twitter Timeline overall.
What would be the point if you were able to get on twitter but most of the people you correspond with aren’t because they’re on a free plan? I wouldn’t buy in to a two-tiered approach.
the problem with this model is the user base would drop considerably making it no longer the place to be because not everybody is there.
I agree with Dave Joyce. Exhorbitant fees that would net such a large sum could cause further alienation from its users if it should experience more trouble down the line. A more reasonable fee, however, strikes a middle ground between raising money to make Twitter reliable and keeping the people happy. Also consider that maybe 5% would pay $250/year, but maybe 50% would pay $25/year.
I think my price break would be $9.99/mo.
Would it work if it’s priced per tweet, or tiered # of tweets/mo.? (ie: $9.99/mo for 100 tweets, $14.99/mo for 500… etc)
When thinking about Twitter, I’ve often become worried how they were going to make $$, I just hope we never see forced tweet advertising.
a small fee would be ok if it was for a reliable service, however over 25 dollars a year is abit much.
Dave Joyce has the right idea… the Flickr price is the equivalent of the “Nintendo price point” for online software services: somewhere around 50 cents a week to a maximum of 1 USD a week. At that price it’s not a hard purchase, and you would even “gift” to other people. $250 a year gets you to think, nah, there are other services out there.
Calacanis, Scoble and Leo Laporte are 20,000+ followers, and they are not good benchmarks. Most power users have max a few thousand followers, and me with < 1000, I would go with Flickr’s $25 a year.
OTOH, just out of sheer survivability, Twitter should put Scoble, Dvorak, LeoLaporte, Calacanis and Arrington on their own dedicated servers. That in itself might solve their problems. I hope they’re using a clever combo of memcached and some type of front-end cache or protocol processor.
Hate to think they’re just sticking with the vanilla Web serving solutions for Ruby on Rails. They should hire the Wikipedia administrators for a month or so, they got scalability and volume figured out a few years ago.
I’m not sure I’d go quite as high as $20 a month, but $99 a year? That’s not out of the question.
I don’t think I’d pay… I like twitter as a free service, but if other people wanted to I suppose they should get the opportunity.
No I wouldn’t
I’d probably pay $50-$100 per year but $250’s a bit exorbitant. That said, as Twitter gets more and more integrated into my daily media stops, $250 may become a real possibility (given a few more features and improvements).
Ultimately I think they’d lose if they implemented such a plan, because other free services would fill the breach.
$20 a mont is far too much. Per year, maybe. If Twitter indeed went subscription-based, I’d jump at it, though I’d be more inclined to pay $10 a year (college student). That said, guarantee uptime and it’s definitely worth considering.
Totally agree with Dave - you can’t offer a flaky free service and then charge for one that works.
If you’re going to offer a free service, it should work.
I’d be quite happy to pay for a “Pro” account if it added extra value, like the Pro Flickr account does.
Agree with Russell & Dave, that you can’t have a free flaky service and then pay for one that works. A flaky service doesn’t give me confidence that any version would work.
I wouldn’t mind the Flickr model though, where there are benefits (and NB free Flickr works well) as suggested above, namely remove all the performance-related API limitations for subscribers - the update rate limit, friends timeline history and all that.
I certainly wouldn’t pay $20/month, Dave Joyce and Russell Cooper have called this one correctly.
Twitter is a reasonably simple service and with the amount of funding behind them (and potential for more, if they need it) there is absolutely no excuse for all of this downtime.
I would be happy to pay a small monthly fee to twitter if they offered me extra features but I’m not paying for Twitter’s poor software architecture choices and subsequent downtime. Would you pay facebook for uptime? flickr? del.icio.us? No, because they all have ~100% uptime already.
What would happen if standard (non-premuim) twitter accounts started to attain 100% uptime? The incentive to buy premium accounts is gone. This business model gives twitter an incentive for downtime.
~£10 a month simply for 100% uptime is alot really. on the other hand a small fee for unlimited message updates, API access and priority server access would be nice.
Twitter could perhaps exploit the freemium model. e.g. 90% of users pay nothing, service is funded by 10% who pay for a premium service. Premium could mean better uptime but also additional functionality, e.g. bigger weekly SMS limit.
“If 1% of 10m users would pay this fee you are looking at 100k paid users. ”
I don’t think twitter has anything near 10m users.
E.g. According to Techcrunch[1] they have about 200,000 active users (active=posts once a week) and around 1M total users (users who have posted at least once).
And no, I would not pay for twitter.
[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/29/end-of-speculation-the-real-twitter-usage-numbers/
What makes you think that giving money to Twitter is going to make any difference in its uptime?
You’ll give them $20/mo, but then you’ll be even more irritated, because you’ll be paying for a service that goes down often.
Throwing money at Twitter isn’t the answer. A smart reworking of its hardware AND software architecture is, which can be accomplished through venture money, such as the $15 million it recently received.
Only a relative handful of people would give money to Twitter — not enough to have it swimming in so much cash that uptime is guaranteed. The A-listers and those with a serious addiction and a generous budget would pay up … and that’s not enough of a cash pool to make a difference.
The notion that those who pay would get access to a more robust network, while the freebies flounder, is also flawed. You’d have the payees only able to talk to themselves reliably, and then what do you have? Pownce!
Pay = quality is a nice thought, but it’s not realistic. Anyone around here got a Comcast account?
As I now view twitter as a media outlet, paying a dollar a week or even five dollars a month would be worth it, if the reliability was there.
A buck a week would be a good price, but as others have said paying for uptime wouldn’t work. If the majority of people I follow can’t post, what would I be paying for? I use twitter to get info, not necessarily to send out info.
In a word Pat… No.
I really like twitter I use it every day but…
Twitter is in my view an early generation product which because of it’s many problems will have difficulty spreading to the general users. Why? because the emphasis is on what are you doing and this becomes the social object around which conversation happens. While this is useful for highly motivated people in the social space such as bloggers (for whom lifestreaming is the norm) and entrepeneurs (for whom it is a PR exercise) most people in the world don’t want this lifestreaming effect to this extent.
So twitter or a competitor needs to find something else for people to talk about and socialise around. Friendfeed steps in the right direction with RSS etc. but this can and will be taken a step further as, similar to all things on the internet, this space will tend towards how, what and who people socialise around in the offline world.
What is Twitter worth to you? Cast your vote here:
http://www.degutis.com/blog/?p=19
I personally wouldn’t pay and don’t believe it’s right that a free service should all of a sudden become good for select users who want to throw money at it.
Part of its appeal is that it is free. In my opinion getting the owner rich quick to make a few twitter addicts richer only will worsen the experience for everyone else.
A definite no no .