I’ve been wondering a lot recently how Twitter is going to be monetised when it eventually happens. Right now everyone’s really happy using it, and after the airliner in the Hudson being broken 1st on Twitter, people are saying this is Twitter’s tipping point and from now on it will be mainstream like Facebook and Myspace.

There must be a lot of people using Twitter now. 10′s of millions maybe. That must take a lot of resources. At some point soon the people paying for those resources must be thinking about bringing some money back in.

So how might they do it?

The most obvious way is to slap some advertising on there. This could be blanket advertising, it could be contextual advertising based on the content of the page or it could be targeted ads based on users likes and dislikes. While long-time twitterers might be put-off by this, most people are used to seeing ads on any free site. It could be an easy way to start making decent money from the site.

The second way I see Twitter being monetised could be through charging for premium services. Things like being able to have threaded discussions, categorisation of the people you follow and other highly desired features could be placed behind a subscription-only wall. The subscription service might also be a way to view twitter without ads. Free users get peppered with ads, while premium members  can have the relative tranquility of the service they knew before monetisation.

Does anyone else have any ideas on how twitter might be monetised? Please leave a comment.

This week I posted a stupid post here about things not to say to someone from Scotland. It was trivial, but I thought some people might like it at digg.com so I submitted it there. Yeah, stupid is as stupid does. 5 diggs was the hit rate and virtually no traffic.

Yesterday morning I thought I would just submit it to stumbleupon too. I’ve got a rubbish profile on stumbleupon, no friends there and most of the pages I submit are my own.

So I check analytics this morning and that single page racked up 2,192 pageviews yesterday – from stumbleupon alone.  That’s insane numbers compared to the rest of the site. I know that they’ll all disappear again today and we’ll be back to normal stats but still.  Over 2K pageviews for a 20 minute blog post!!! I’ll never doubt the power of stumbleupon again.

Click to see full size

For a Stumbler or Digger who doesn’t have a very big profile yet, submitting to both these social networks can be a good way to gain a bit of extra traffic, but which is better?

Digg can bring masses of traffic for anyone who can get their post to go popular, but without having spent a long time building up a profile it can be difficult to get your content in front of enough people to get dugg. As a result, the novice digger can end up submitting articles and receiving no visits to their site at all. Even if the articles are good informative pieces that should be useful to digg readers, they just don’t get seen.

Then there is Stumbleupon. Pretty much from the moment you sign up, if you submit to Stumbleupon you will get visitors to your site. From experience you may receive around a hundred extra visitors for each page you submit. If you analyse your stats though it doesn’t seem like the highest quality traffic. Page view times are usually down and bounce rates are way up.

So what’s best? In my opinion, even though Digg is harder work initially, I prefer the way it works. If you take Digg seriously it seems entirely possible to get some good traffic from it once you’ve built up a profile. With Digg, I think that the chances of getting traffic that are actually interested in your subject is much higher. Stumble upon traffic is like foot traffic passing a specialist shop on the street. For the most part only a small percentage of those people stumbling past your site are even remotely interested in what you are selling.

Of course the on-the-fence attitude would say you should build a profile on both sites and submit to them both but as for which is better, I’ll jump on the side of Digg.

Chicklets, bookmarklets, share this, Digg this buttons are everywhere. Inviting you to click and bookmark or share with the world. Sounds great. An easy way to build a list of articles you like and share them with everyone.

If you’re a blog owner, stick these buttons on your blog or site and it makes it look like your hip to the crowd, deep into the social networking thang! Your readers are gonna make everything you write go viral.

The problem is, of the 10 articles that I’ve clicked the “Digg this” button on this week, 9 of them have never been submitted to Digg yet. I click on one of these chicklets, expecting it to quickly come up and say that it’s been Dugg. But instead I get “Processing your submission”. Hang on, it’s not my submission. Oh wait a minute, they want me to choose a title, description and category for this article. It’s not even mine. Oh well, I’ll do the guy a favour and submit it for him. Here goes then:

Title: Stupid Haggis Wants Me To Digg His Stuff But Can’t Be Arsed To Digg It Himself
Description: Honestly, it’s a rubbish article. The guy can barely write, and he’s not funny. I don’t know why he’s even in my feed reader.
Category: Offbeat > Pets and Animals

Searching for duplicates…

Is it original?  (How should I know? A million people might have already written exactly the same crap, word for word) Yes, totally original I swear.

And so it goes. If I had the time to waste doing this, I would submit all these articles on other people’s behalf, making sure that the title was pure Digg gold and the description reeled people in by the thousand. Or maybe not.

Now, I better go check if I’ve submitted my own articles!

Maybe twitter is of some use after all… Student tells his mates about his arrest in Egypt. On twitter

I’ve been doing a bit of investigation recently into Stumbleupon and Twitter – two well talked about social bookmarking sites. So far the results are looking good for Stumbleupon. Analytics reports two pages that I have bookmarked in Stumbleupon getting massive traffic spikes over the course of a day or two. Might not be high quality targetted traffic, but it’s traffic all the same. Twitter on the other hand so far looks like it’s just for fun. If you’re on Twitter, look me up. http://twitter.com/bigcrags.

Or does it just need a fresh approach? The BBC seem to have it in for social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. As does the Scotsman – their last article that I read on the subject was definitely trying to give people the fear. Media channels gleefully report that people are deserting the big sites in droves. I hear loads of people complaining that they just don’t have time for them and that they worry about privacy. I personally can’t be arsed with them. Yes I’ve got a Facebook page but that just sits there. All the people named as my friends are contactable by email or phone, so I don’t take part in Facebook Messaging. I don’t put anything personal on this type of site, not even my correct date of birth.

I wonder if it would be different though if there was some money riding on using your social networking site.
That’s what I was introduced to this weekend.

Visit http://www.zenzuu.com/bigcrags and see if this site doesn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to MySpace or Facebook. It definitely does, though with one crucial difference. The team at Zenzuu are promising to pay out 80% of all their advertising revenues back to the site members. Sounds like the communists have moved in at Bebo? It does to me, but there’s nothing to lose and it’s a completely free signup so I’ve gone ahead and created a limited profile.

The theory would appear to be that the more active you are in introducing your mates onto the site then the more money you’ll receive in the big share-out each month.

The site is clearly in it’s infancy, without any major advertisers on board as far as I can see, and the concept does sound a little like a cashback site so it will be interesting to see if people are keen enough to share a few quid between them to move themselves and all of their friends away from Facebook or MySpace. Only time will tell I guess.