ReTweet This! Twitter To Charge For Reading Tweets

This is something that might come as a shock to general twitter users — Twitter Japan has declared that they will be introducing paid account in twitter. No, you don’t have to pay to use an account but you can choose to charge your followers.

Yes, in something that seems slightly counter-intuitive at the beginning but completely logical the next minute, this is probably the first solid money making scheme that twitter has ever thought of.

The concept does ring right because twitter’s value is in the content that the users generate and not exactly in the service itself. So instead of adding some kerfuffle and charging users for using those features, why not just let premium users charge their followers a small amount for accessing premium content?

The amount charged will be around $1.5 to $11.5 and the payment modes will vary. Users can choose to use a credit card or they can choose to have it added to their mobile phone bills. They can also buy pre-paid vouchers from vendors. Twitter simply takes 30% off the payments.

This will not be implemented anywhere other than twitter Japan and frankly speaking – only Japan has the kind of mobile infrastructure where you would be able to do something like this. Their daily lives are completely tied around their mobile phones and they use it to do a lot daily transactions – from train tickets to mobile shopping, they have the choice to pay for everything using their mobile phones.

Twitter Japan is the perfect place for such experiments and they have been doing that for a while now. So when this was announced at this year’s MobiDec, it definitely should not have come as a surprise to anyone.

The charges will be monthly and they will be up to the account holder to set but I reckon there will some kind of minimum and maximum. The figures mentioned are probably it.

Twitter Japan already has other exclusive services like a video sharing service, so this will be right up their alley.

Twitter’s profitability has always been a question mark but the founders have always been confident that they will think of something. And now it looks like they have thought of it. Since this is Japan, it is likely to be popular because it is merely a question of paying for another thing through an existing system. Back in the US and in the rest of world, online payments will probably be the only option.

But I sure hope twitter is not overlooking certain ripe markets where micropayments are completely the rage. These are mainly emerging markets like India where mobile phone consumption is very high but the per unit spending is low. Most handsets are on pre-paid connections and the most recharges are below $1 at a time. If twitter can serve up an integrated service in this kind of a market, it might be profitable the same the mobile companies are – through sheer volume.

After all, once you get hooked onto twitter’s real time stream, there is little than can replace it for you. In all the recent events where major things have happened anywhere, we have received the first updates via twitter. The firs analyses, the first report, everything has been ahead of news channels in twitter. And those who think that newsrooms do fact checking which is why they are late – think again. There are multiple instances where the news reports have been erroneous, like in case of the recent Tiger Woods incident. But twitters sheers mass effect makes sure that the actual facts get pushed through for the public to scrutinize and in real time. Besides, if and when a major accident happens in your locality, twitter is your only source of information because nothing else will cover it. Crowd sourced data is extremely valuable and we are just beginning to see why. [read]