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Comment by Kylekramer | Hacker News Reader

People who want to pay needs to understand that:

A. You are the exception. I am willing to bet .1% of users would be a overestimation of Twitterers willing to pay.

B. Setting up premium accounts and a payment system would probably run fairly close to break even. Not mention the additional customer service that would be expected and the complications that arise from splitting the userbase.

C. You aren't the real money. Twitter wants Coca Cola's money, CBS's money, etc. They don't care about pocket change from Joe Blogger. They are selling a package of 200 million people straight up, not a package of 200 million minus the most engaged and loyal users.

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Do you really think the portion of the userbase that uses Twitter for work is really that small? I'm thinking of all the businesses, news networks, marketing, etc. that is done through the service. I don't think it's worth splitting up current development resources, but it's definitely worth thinking about as a direction of expansion.

Yeah but those companies, Coca Cola etc, can only pay as long as Twitter have the user-base. And if the adverts cause users to go visit the site less, then their revenue stream from advertising would shrink.

Would they put averts in the Developer-API responses too? One one hand it's free to use, on the other hand it's being paid for by advertising. What company wants to be a slave to advertising companies? That sounds like a difficult situation to be in.

A 30-minute long TV show is actually only about 21.5 minutes long. The rest is advertising. People will tolerate it if the rest of the content is relevant and engaging.

If the ads are well targeted then they make people even more accepting of them.

I pay Netflix $9 a month and I have no commercials to speak of. What is the marginal ad revenue of every user on Twitter? If it's <$1/mo then there should be a premium, ad-less Twitter available for purchase at $1.99/mo.

You're not accounting to the effect a premium service has on marginal ad revenue per user. It goes down as the people with disposable income (the most desirable demographic) opt out of ads.

I bet th effect of even of the most engaged users isn't worth $10/month in ad revenue. Although I think there would be an irrational element in the pitch of reach the whole Twitter userbase vs reach the users that haven't paid.

You also don't (yet, at least) pay for "new" content. People sitting through commercials (or paying for cable) get content before it is even available to you.

Such is the nature of disruptive technologies. The "yet" in your comment speaks volumes on the impending doom of traditional, multi-channel television. The core value of Twitter, however, is the fresh and organic nature of the information flowing through it. Netflix relies much more on quality than newness. The major difference here is that advertisers are paying to have information artificially inserted into the Twitter-verse where the core value is the organic nature of the content. A subscription greater than marginal ad revenue would greatly increase the amount of organic info on Twitter (both to subscribers and free users) which would lead to more users which would lead to more overall ad revenue.

I don't think this argument really applies to TV, where viewers really haven't had any voting power about ads. Until very recently, they either watched TV or didn't, and I doubt people ever stopped watching TV and stopped digesting TV media because of ads.

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