Twitter Troubles?
Steve Rubel spots one of the problems with the "lets run a site without a business plan" theory that Twitter seems to be following:
In the good ol' United States of America, the receiver pays the SMS bill. In Canada, Australia, Europe and I believe much of Asia, the sender pays. For Twitter , this may add up fast.
This brings to mind something I heard on last week's TWIT - Jason Calacanis called in, and mentioned an enormous bill for text messages (it was over $200 in the space of a week, I think). Now translate that to the bills arriving at Twitter headquarters for all the SMS notifications they get from people (and possibly the ones they send, if they support international SMS). Either way, that's a lot of money bleeding out.
The only business model I can spot for Twitter is "get bought by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft".
Comments
my thoughts on the business model...
[Mike D] March 22, 2007 12:40:14.646
http://www.mdoeff.com/blog/2007/03/22/future-of-twitter-part-2/
Companies like Woot are already using Twitter as a new marketing channel. There is no such thing as a free ride. Twitter should be compensated for any "tweets" that is marketing related, just like an ad impression.