BusinessWeek: Twitter Begins to Show Actual Business Model

As BusinessWeek reports, Twitter’s business model is finally beginning to show—despite the founders’ supposed lack of interest in one. “An early sign came in April, when the popular microblogging service launched in Japan and the home page for every Japanese user included a big banner ad in the top right corner.”

Then, early in August, the company limited the number of people a single user could follow to 2,000. A week later, it axed outbound text message delivery to mobile phones in all countries except the U.S., Canada, and India.

All of these moves show that Twitter is consolidating around ways to make the service profitable. And it’s audience has to have value.

But what next? BW posted four ideas: asking users to pay, selling some messages to sponsors, sell user data for money, or sell ads. The first two would drive users nuts. The third one raises privacy concerns. The only viable option is to sell ads. But as the article points out, response rates will be low; in the end, it’s possible a big site like Microsoft or Google will just buy Twitter and add it as “another hood ornament service” like Gmail or Hotmail, which would certainly seem anti-climatic at this point.

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