I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet.
Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not get a better return out of Adsense or FB Ads.
Wouldn't that be the fastest way to kill any innovation at once? Paid APIs aren't exactly the most popular thing out there (specially on consumer sites), and I don't think enough people would pay for it/represent a sizeable chunk of profit...
While Salesforce is not a pure model of a paid API, they're not exactly unpopular.
When original Google Maps API came out, developers literally were begging Google to introduce paid APIs for some of the stuff they were writing. I went to a maps meetup in Sunnyvale, and that quickly became the subject of the night.
Developers understand that paid APIs
(a) offer SLAs
(b) usually are not changed drastically, which for maps scenario allows embedding them into hardware
(c) come with a phone number for emergency support
(d) hint at what developer's pricing schema should be (e.g. if API charges a monthly subscription fee, makes sense to build the product around that, if it's number of queries to the API, makes sense to incorporate the final product into a few options for light, medium and heavy users).
I am just trying to provide alternatives. I have no idea what twitters revenues are. Perhaps a tiered system like mailchimp has? If you have under a certain amount of requests it would be free. Paid applications which heavily use the API could be charged more.
Also, as I mentioned in my comment above, I think a premium subscription would be in order. I would pay for a service that saves tweets, and provided basic analytics. I am just trying to get the conversation going about alternatives. If anyone else has possible revenue alternatives for Twitter, I'd be interested to hear them.
(I clicked to downvote your comment by accident, while trying to upvote it. So sorry, my stubby fingers don't work well with small icons on an ipad :( )
Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not get a better return out of Adsense or FB Ads.