Would You Pay for Subscription Tweets?
Crossed my mind recently that Twitter has a built-in mechanism for setting up a subscription-based feed: protected requests. Anyone can set their account to being protected, which forces other people to ask for permission to see your tweets. You can grant and revoke permission on an individual basis, and can always see who is currently following you.
I happened to read Joe Anderson’s post Is it possible to be a full-time Twitterer? at about the same time as this was percolating away on the back-burner. Joe focused on advertising and affiliate programs as potential revenue generators – and they certainly are – but I wonder if people would pay for content? Say, for example, that I went out and recruited the top movie reviewers on the web to provide mini Twitter-reviews of everything they see into a locked @jaymoviereviews Twitter feed. For $10/year, you could have access to that feed, paid through PayPal’s subscription service. I would get notice of each payment, including the payee’s Twitter name, and would then look for a Request from them and grant them access (presumably this could also be automated through the PayPal and Twitter APIs). Each reviewer gets paid out per tweet to the channel, in proportion to the total number of subscribers.
Subscription-based services haven’t done particularly well on the web in the past, with big name sites like the New York Times trying and then abandoning a paywall on their TimesSelect service. I think this could be different though: there’s a potential here for hyperlocal content publication, and potentially even for discussion with the authors. Would you pay $10 a year for access to the best restaurant reviews in your town, sent straight to your Twitter account? What about people who buy Word or Joke-a-Day calendars for much more than that? I suspect that the predominance of free content on Twitter (and the web in general) likely means this is a non-starter, but I’m curious to hear what you think.
» December 19th, 2008, 1:11 am • permalink • categories: Observatory • tags: business model, joe anderson, new york times, paywall, subscription, Twitter, updates • Subscribe to comments for this entry through the 
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"Would you pay $10 a year for access to the best restaurant reviews in your town, sent straight to your Twitter account?"
no way.
I would use Urban spoon on my iPhone and let it find the restaurants around me… much better then scrolling through 140 characters of nothing more than a links to blog posts.
anyways, the best restaurant reviews are the comments under the actual review… twitter is megaphone, not a conversation.
It's certainly an interesting idea. Another parallel is the people who pay to receive text messages on their phone (jokes, etc).
On twitter, I think this business model might work in micro-niches, where the content is for a VERY specific audience, and there's no other way of getting it in a different channel for free.
Not a chance.
Joe —
That’s a great parallel. A quick look at the world of ‘premium SMS’ content shows some stuff like Making Premium SMS Pay in the United States, which suggests that this market is booming in Asia and Europe. Looks like there are a ton of companies working to bring PSMS to the North American market: Quios, ClearSky, Mobile Storm, etc. Wonder if any of them are looking at the space?
Joe –
That's a great parallel. A quick look at the world of 'premium SMS' content shows some stuff like Making Premium SMS Pay in the United States, which suggests that this market is booming in Asia and Europe. Looks like there are a ton of companies working to bring PSMS to the North American market: Quios, ClearSky, etc. Wonder if any of them are looking at the space?