Twitter To 3rd Party Devs: Pony Up Some Cash
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.
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.
Seems like a good move on Twitters part. They have to start generating revenue from somewhere.
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%?).
I agree James, they need to create separate systems for Twitter only and aggregated apps, which is what I assume they will do.