> There will be two “pillars” to Twitter’s business model, Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said at the company’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco. The first, announced earlier this week, is [Promoted Tweets](http://www.macworld.com/article/150571/2010/04/twitter_ads.html), which lets advertisers pay for sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results for certain keywords.
via [macworld.com](http://www.macworld.com/article/150650/2010/04/twitter_revenue.html?lsrc=rss_main)
I don’t know. Seems like the classic old “bait and switch” to me. Very few companies have gotten away with giving a service away for free, and then suddenly changing it to either a paid service, or an ad-based service. It seems like they are going about it carefully, only adding ads for search results so far, but it’s only a matter of time before we all start seeing ads in all our feeds. It’s a slippery slope, and some people are bound to reject this idea.
I wonder if Twitter plans on adding ads to Tweetie, now that it has purchased the app from Atebits. I sure hope not.
The only question is what other free service will step in and take those disgruntled users from Twitter? I can hear the wheels spinning in garages all over the Silicon Valley right now.
Commercial accounts could work, provided that companies can get people to follow them. At least if the ads are “opt-in”, users won’t be so quick to feel betrayed.
This is the classic Internet Startup problem all over again. We really haven’t learned anything from the original Dot Com bubble burst.
Is there really no room left in the world for a company that simply charges a fair price for its services from the get go?
