Twitter To Charge For Premium Accounts Later This Year
gigaom.com/2009/08/21/419-twitter-to-get-premium-accounts-later-this-year
From the page
Saved with the link. Notes from 2007 to 2016 are mostly the page's own words, so this is probably an excerpt.
About Twitters plans to bring in $140 million in revenue next year ... some of it will come from charging users for premium accounts. The accounts will include detailed analytics and ID verification (so that businesses dont have to worry about having their brands hijacked by impostors); co-founder Biz Stone told VentureBeat that Twitter is in the first phase of rolling out these accounts.
Twitter is also working on new APIs, or programming languages that companies can use to create apps (like TweetDeck), geared specifically toward business customers; Stone said the commercial APIs would be out later this year. The goal is to offer enterprises a suite of toolsfrom the APIs, the account verification and the premium analyticsthat they feel justified paying for.
There has been tons of speculation around Twitters revenue-generation plans: yesterday I suggested that they were prepping to offer geotargeted ads; board member Todd Chaffee alluded to a potential e-commerce platform, while Kevin Thau, Twitters head of mobile business development, hinted at rev-sharing deals with wireless carriers and handset makers for its use as a mobile utility.
Related
Twitter To Add Location DataA Precursor To Geotargeted Ads? Twitter Expects $140 Million In Revenue By 2010