• Marketing/TechCrunch, Tuesday, February 10, 2009 11 AM

In an interview with British trade pub Marketing, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone reveals that Twitter may soon start charging companies that use the site for commercial purposes. "We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them," Stone says. "We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts."

This is hardly a big surprise, writes TechCrunch's Robin Wauters, as tech pundits have been saying for months that charging companies is the most obvious move Twitter could make to start generating some revenue. But many are expecting more from the microblogging sensation. In the Marketing interview, Stone adds that charging companies could "create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool." He also confirms that Twitter will not charge individual users.

So who, exactly, will the Web startup charge, and for what? Wauters uses Dell as an example. Over the holiday period, the computer maker reportedly made $1 million in sales through Twitter; it also recently started giving discounts exclusively to its Twitter followers. Wauters thinks we'll definitely see more of this kind of behavior in the future, although it's still unclear what exactly constitutes "commercial usage."

Read the whole story at Marketing/TechCrunch »