Saturday, August 4, 2012

The difficult challenge of media alignment

Great post. Twitter's ads are annoying. I know they have to do it, but it would be great to be able to turn them off. 

Seth's Blog

"Which leads to the conundrum faced by Twitter as they try to monetize sufficiently to justify the expectations of their investors.

If they relentlessly sell the attention of their users, they will have a misalignment as they maximize profit. The advertisers will want ever more attention, and the users will want to avoid those interruptions the advertisers are paying for. Tension will keep rising as users feel trapped by a medium with few substitutes that begins to charge an ever higher tax in the form of attention wasted.

My suggestion: Twitter has the opportunity to become extraordinarily aligned with their best users. Offer the top users the opportunity to pay $10 a month. For that fee, they can get an ever-growing list of features, including analytics, verification, 160 characters, who knows...

10,000,000 users choosing to pay $10 a month means that the service turns a profit (!) of more than a billion dollars a year. And because the company is in alignment with their most powerful and evangelical users, that number grows over time. Every decision proposed will have to answer just one question: what makes our users happier?

Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash."