So We Cost Twitter $1,000 Per Year? Why Do They Still Refuse to Charge Us?

There are two things I want to say about Twitter today: one good and one bad. The good one is that they have finally started to think in terms of business, money and sustainability. The bad one is that they are doing it in a very peculiar way that will not be appreciated by users.

So what happened yesterday was Twitter leaving all the users outside of the US, Canada, and India without SMS notifications. The problem is that every time you send an update to Twitter and pay for one text message yourself, Twitter will have to pay for all those messages sent to your followers that have chosen to enable those mobile notifications for your updates. This definitely sounds expensive – Biz Stone mentions that the amount can be as high as $1,000 per user per year.

The difference between these three countries and the rest of the world was that Twitter had established relationships with carriers over there. And obviously “the rest of the world” means too many countries and too many carriers to negotiate with. Twitter team promises to continue trying and add new countries once they are ready but does not offer any certain deadlines or even countries.

I myself don’t live in any of the 3 Twitter-blessed countries but I don’t feel deprived for the simple reason that I have never been a heavy Twitter by phone user. I don’t really want any SMS notifications about DMs or updates from friends on Twitter when I’m asleep (and most of my friends in the US are awake) – and for urgent issues I have the phone number that is 24/7 and friends or partners who have real questions can always reach me there.

But even here in Russia I know some (not many) people who are heavily addicted to Twitter and who actually used SMS notifications for their updates. Judging by the comments on the Twitter announcement of the decision, there are quite a number of users complaining already with the most furious criticism coming from Australia.

Actually I have grown kind of indifferent to Twitter recently – we have seen so many features disabled already and we have grown to live without them. I’m pretty sure people will learn to live without this one as well, especially given the costs that text messaging currently involves even in the US.

So to me the news is not particularly bad – instead, I finally see a business-oriented thinking behind Twitter and this is already a much-needed change. After all, we’ve been talking about Twitter business model for too long already without actually seeing anything on behalf of Twitter. This is why finally witnessing them counting money is good – even if it hurts users.

But the only thing that I don’t understand is why this business-oriented thinking is directed in such a wrong way. Ok, you have chosen to share with us that every user can cost Twitter up to $1,000 per year. I guess any frustrated user will agree that this is a huge amount and no reasonable company is supposed to cover it for a free service. But why don’t you offer your users any options to compensate for it? I see at least two of them:

1. You offer SMS notifications for a fee. Of course, I can hardly imagine anyone will be prepared to pay $1,000 (that is $83 per month). But I think there must be a solution: simply let your users decide what exactly they need the SMS notifications to send and receive for (something like a data plan of sorts) and pay exactly for what they get.
2. You make SMS notifications ad-supported and explain it clearly to the users. In this manner if I want to get my notifications on my handheld, I agree that you will send me an ad from a local company in every, say, 10^th message. If I want to continue using the service for free, I might agree to that as well. And I don’t think it’s really impossible to agree with some ad network for an exclusive service like this to cover worldwide ads.

So the bad thing about this purely business decision is that Twitter has chosen not to offer users any options where they seem to be absolutely possible. Depriving people of something and sending them to competitors is not the best way to handle business decisions – especially when a painful business decision could turn into a revenue stream for the company.