Once again I'm just sad to see the continued erosion from the awesomeness that was Twitter. Twitter are killing off the good and magnifying the bad, all in the pursuit of goals that seem to be forcing a continuous decrease in the quality of end user experiences.
The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams, and charge us to upgrade to see an ad-free steam.
Some other obvious approaches mentioned down the thread: Charge for API access, charge for exceeding API limits, charge for exceeding certain follower numbers, charge (at various levels) for analytics, charge for feature sets inside things like Tweetdeck, charge for access to certain API functions and so on.
It's hard to see $9 billion worth in these ideas, but that's only if we think in the short term.
Twitter could be genuinely worth that in 5 or 10 years, but only if it focussed on customers, and that's only going to happen if the founders vision trumps the very short term investor greed.
Saying it's trivial is kind of ridiculous; it's not. It's worth considering that rolling back the API like this will bring a lot of users back to the site to actually see those ads.
Regardless, as a developer it sucks to see companies take away fun tools, but as an entrepreneur I like seeing them at least try and execute an actual business plan.
I suspect if they made it a terms of service violation to block adds they could fairly effectively police smartphone apps. If nothing else it would be interesting to see them try.
I am also of the opinion that a vary cheap add blocking option say 1$/month would prevent most people from jumping though many hoops for add-block software.
I agree with what you're saying, but you really don't have to "jump through hoops" to get ad-block software. It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension.
I think the better argument is that most people don't know/care for ad-blocking software. I think AdBlock and its alternatives are prevalent in the tech community, but we're just a small part of total users.
>It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension.
I'd be willing wager that those 30 seconds of barrier would deter like 70-80% of the computer using population. Very few people as a whole know or are comfortable with browser extensions.
If it was only a dollar or two per month and not a -complete- pain in the ass to sign up for, I'd probably pay anyway.
I wonder if you could encourage the people who hate ads but would happily take a legitimate option by detecting ad blockers and instead of haranguing them for it, put up a polite advert for how to legitimise their ad free usage? (thinking in general, not just for twitter)
That's a good idea. Just the other day I turned off Ad-Block on the Let's Play Archive (http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/) because they had a little banner message that asked me nicely if I would consider it.
Is it wrong that I blame IE for a lot of this? I feel like IE was a major factor in ramming the "DON'T INSTALL TOOLBARS / ACTIVEX ADD-ONS NOT NO WAY NOT NO HOW" knowledge down consumers' throats (and that still remains good advice).
Most people aren't even aware that they could be experiencing the web ad-free. It just never even occurs to them that should a thing could be possible.
This seems to me to be the problem. They took too much money to monetize in this way. A few bucks a month from a few million users, plus whatever they can make by occasionally inserting ads into the stream (which can't be that much considering how many people would never even see an ad because their streams are too noisy) just doesn't seem like enough to justify all the VC money...
Agreed, that's why I said "a few bucks a month from a few million users". I can't imagine that more than a couple million of their hundreds of millions of users would pay to remove the ads from their feeds.
Perhaps they can charge for certain items that can be considered premium, such as verified accounts. I still doubt there'll be a couple million of users willing to pay though.
I have a hypothesis that any company reaching a certain growth threshold becomes evil :) If there's already a fancy named law on this matter, let me know. Oh, btw, the very top level is reserved for companies that are too big to fail :)
The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams, and charge us to upgrade to see an ad-free steam.