If you’ve got exclusive content, the main way to get value from Twitter followers has been to lead them to your own website – but Super Chirp! aims to change that by monetizing your Direct Messages within Twitter itself.
It’s best suited to celebrities, news outlets or possibly charities, but any publisher can sign up. You set a monthly price between $0.99 and $9.99, and you get to keep a healthy 70% of the cash. Super Chirp! takes 30%, which includes Paypal fees.
As a user, you subscribe for Direct Message feeds via the Super Chirp! site, with Paypal payments, and you can then visit Super Chirp! to see all the messages and sort by publisher.
It’s an interesting concept, and one that’s covered in quite a lot of detail by Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch. In fact, Narendra Rocherolle, CEO of 83 Degrees, which has also launched Power Twitter Firefox Add-On, initially wrote about the idea in a guest post on Techcrunch discussing the Britney Spears Twitter account.
As Arrington hypothesises – this could be one route to cash for Twitter itself, and Super Chirp! could find itself either contending against an official version (perhaps linked in to the new officially verified Twitter accounts), or acquired.
The trickiest bit will be deciding the split between content for building up a network, and content that will be valuable enough to be worth charging for – particularly when it will need to be chunked into 140 character messages. The nature of short messages lends itself to quick links and newsflashes – which is the kind of content which rapidly finds a way around paywalls – possibly leading to a lot of disgruntled ex-followers.
And longer form content will feel immensely disjointed – although there might be some promise in the Twitter novels which have risen up recently, or for some type of Twitter-based soap opera, for example.
But the main way I would imagine most people utilising this tool will be simply to privately broadcast links to exclusive content behind a paywall – which would be an email alert/RSS alternative.
As someone who has experimented with, and witnessed the backlash against, the likes of Magpie adverts being included in streams, and Twitad sponsored backgrounds, it seems slightly ironic that the main 3rd party applications to make money on Twitter appear to be short form versions of traditional display advertising and paywalls – the very things which newspapers are maligned for seeing as the sole revenue options.
Are there better ways to directly generate cash from Twitter when it comes to content? Or is it always going to be a publicity/network tool to drive revenue from elsehwere?