Now Reading
Twitter To 3rd Party Devs: Pony Up Some Cash

Twitter To 3rd Party Devs: Pony Up Some Cash

Twitter 3rd Party Pay

Twitter today announced that they are no longer giving 3rd party developers a free ride on their platform, demanding a cut of advertising revenues earned by outside 3rd party programs.

According to Duncan Riley:

The new demand follows a change to the Twitter API announced earlier that has banned all third party ad providers from auto-posting to Twitter accounts.

Twitter announced the changes in their Terms of Service (TOS) in which they state they should receive compensation:

“where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale .”

Oddly enough they don’t state what that cut will be, although a 30% charge could be in line given Apple’s success and Facebook’s attempts to collect money at that level.

See Also
Search Console Upgrade

Analysts have been trying to figure out Twitter’s business model for a while now and this is a good step for the company as they continue to build their revenue model.

It will be interesting to see how these payments work for programs such as Seesmic which offer multiple account types (Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and others) on a single application.

Come on Twitter, pony up some more detailed information.

View Comments (3)
  • Hopefully they don’t ask for too much…if facebook, twitter, and google buzz ask for 30%, I guess we would be left with 10% to our name. I think it would be more appropriate if Twitter takes 30%/services_offered_by_app. So if my app aggregates 4 services, Twitter would take 30%/4 = 7.5%. Either that or a different model for dedicated Twitter apps (30%) or apps that also stream tweets among other platforms (10%?).

Scroll To Top