TwitPub: Charge for your tweets

By Rafe Needleman on 16 April 2009, 12:51pm

This was bound to happen: someone has invented a paid-access scheme for Twitter. TwitPub is a marketplace where twitterers can sell access to their updates, by registering their protected accounts with the service. Other Twitter users sign up and pay for access to these accounts on the TwitPub marketplace. TwitPub takes 20 per cent of the subscription revenue for itself and gives 80 per cent to its publishers.

TwitPub works by gating access to protected Twitter accounts. Once a user pays for access to a Twitter stream, the system sends the author of it an email advising him or her to allow that user to see the updates. (The email loop should be removed at some point.)

Authors set their own subscription prices, but the floor is $0.99 (66p) a month, which is too high. Another snag: although author payments are sent to PayPal accounts (handy), subscribers must pay by credit card via WorldPay, a payment-processing system relatively unknown in the US.

But the real question is: is this for real? Can it possibly work? The logic of the founders is not without merit. We're sure there are some people who'd be willing to pay a few pennies to subscribe to regular entertainment (such as horoscopes or gossip) updates or, more likely, financial information such as stock tips. The founders believe that since people pay for access to premium SMS channels in various countries, it indicates that they'll also pay for Twitter updates.

Not us, though. On Twitter as elsewhere on the Internet, there is so much great content available for nothing. And for the truly critical information that we'd pay for, the medium is not important. If we're signing up for some kind of major financial or business alert, we want it to find us wherever we are -- email, IM, phone, Twitter, everywhere. TwitPub doesn't reach that far. In other words, for frothy, fun content it's too expensive, and for important information it's not rich enough.

Moreover, the real money in content is not in getting a few people to pay for the odd update or subscription, but rather using mass distribution to drive consumers to services that are easier to make more money from. Most online music may become free, but used to promote paid concerts; you can read blogs for free but are pitched to pay to attend bloggers' concerts or buy their books; we're on Twitter for free but we want you read our stuff on CNET, which is paid for through advertising. Direct payment for content can work, but on the Web, it's a fringe business.