I picked this up on TechCrunch today and felt it was worth sharing. Please excuse the fact that I’ve not rewritten it, all credit goes to TechCrunch:
A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream.
This is a theme we’ve touched on in the past. There is a huge market for celebrity fan pages that Super Chirp will play right into. In fact, 83 Degrees CEO Narendra Rocherolle wrote a guest post here last year called A Missed Opportunity – Britney On Twitter where he talks about the idea. Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content. Britney Spears has 1.7 million Twitter followers. How many of them would be willing to pay $1, or $10, per month to see a premium stream of her content?
Here’s how Super Chirp works. Unlike Twitpub, where publishers have to create a new Twitter account, Super Chirp works through direct messages (Twitter’s private message system). That means publishers can leverage their existing Twitter accounts to promote the paid streams. Users subscribe to the content on the Super Chirp site, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. They can also visit Super Chirp to see all those paid messages, and sort them by publisher.
This is a natural product for celebrities to embrace. But it’s also interesting for charities – loyal supporters can donate to the charity and get a stream of news relevant to that charity, or whatever. Some news outlets may try to charge for streams as well. I could imagine that at least some of our followers on our main Twitter account would pay to get additional information if it had enough value.
Any publisher that wants to sign up can as long as they have a Twitter account. The publisher sets the price, between $0.99 and $9.99 per month. Super Chirp keeps 30% of the gross, and that includes the Paypal fees. So the Publisher ends up with 70%
Interesting concept and I’m sure it’s going to have a massive following very quickly – It is also going to put a lot of pressure on Twitter now – Kind of ironic that a 3rd party can draw revenue from Twitter, yet Twitter can’t ;)
Eh, I’m not chomping at the bit here. Part of what makes Twitter so awesome is that you get loads of good stuff for free – and get to give freely in return.
If it becomes that easy to set up a pay-per model, we’ll probably see the best providers (or the ones desperately looking to monetize) go full-paid (because who would give away paid content for free?).
Where does that leave us? My-Boring-Life tweets, affiliate marketing tweets and everybody else who can’t afford to pay for good content.
I still think there’s value in reinforcing things like brand loyalty, PR, and crowdsourcing. Simply charging for content doesn’t solve the problem, though of course all the profiteers will disagree ;)
I definitely agree with you. I think this is a clever business/financial move, but it’s effects on users might work negatively.
Let’s see what the uptake is like :)