Week 4: Journal 2

Will Twitter Ever Make Money? Twitter CEO Evan Williams Responds

I watched the video of Evan Williams, the question was little tricky that how Twitter can make money. Personally I feel twitter has a tremendous opportunity similar to facebook where they can generate revenue by advertisement based on the user behavior. Below is one of the video how top companies feels about facebook. I believe twitter will also be taking the similar approach to increase their revenue

Business Models for Social Media Startups:
(http://mashable.com/2009/07/14/social-media-business-models/)

I read the article about the different models for the Social Media startup below is my analysis on the models described in the article.
Freemium Model is one of the key model that will used by most product based startups but the challenge is company should have a clear strategy how they can convert the free service to the subscription bsaed or in simple how they can make the customers to pay for their service. for example as mentioned in the above video Twitter is a free service but the company is yet to come up with the solid strategy for their money making strategy
Affiliate Model is an easy to implement but here the challenge is how you can make users to trust your recommendation and the most important challenge is making the users to come back to your website again and keeping it in pace with the market.
Subscription Model, in this model the challenge is how you can able to provide incremental benefit to the customer and make the customer stick to the service provided. Customer service is a key for this type of model.
Virtual Goods Model, this model is a very challenging model and the company should be creativity and should be able to produce what the community wants and also keep an eye on the competitors products.
Advertising Model, to be successful in this model depends on how much traffic your website can attract and what kind of audience you are targeting.