Twitter Hasn’t Made A Single Penny, But Its Users Are Making Thousands!

If you have dismissed Twitter as another “teenager thingy” which shall be forgotten before you reach middle age, can I politely correct you through this quick post? In the 2nd half of this post, let me mention about how user’s are monetizing Twitter (even before the founders!).

For people using social media like Twitter, Facebook and the like, they already know how ubiquitous its become in the last year. Everybody from our politician Shashi Tharoor to Silicon Valley demigod Guy Kawasaki are using it. Of course media companies, businesses small and big, bloggers, actors, scientists, sports-persons, you name it, they are already there. In the already star studded gallery of Twitter users let me present to you Barack Obama (http://twitter.com/BARACKOBAMA), the President of USA, who used Twitter for his election campaign. Even today you can find his page updated and he is using Twitter to garner support for his policies. I rest my case!

Analysts and people like me have wondered and debated at length on how Twitter could monetize their exploding traffic and roaring publicity bestowed by the media, why even the Twitter’s investors must be waiting for the day when the company’s cash registers go “ka-ching”. While this is happening on one hand, on the other hand people are experimenting with Twitter through creating applications around it, or simplying playing around with existing services and seeing how they can use Twitter to benefit their business, blog or even just their self esteem. Google and Microsoft have tied up with Twitter to use it to make their search results more real time and then use the same to show their contextual ads (to make even more money).

What is interesting apart from just using Twitter to provide updates on whether you scratched your back or your cute little cat yawned is the real dough people are making off it. This report here quotes that John Chow the Canadian blogger (a blogosphere celebrity) made thousands of dollars allowing a media company to send out one liners to his followers on Twitter!

While the jury is out on the ethics of sponsored messages to your community of followers, for someone like John Chow who blogs about different ways online to rake in the moolah, he was just proven right one more time! And guess what, I don’t think this followers complain because they follow him to learn the money-making tricks from him. What a win-win-win for the John Chow, the advertising company and the John’s followers!

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