• John Battelle’s Searchblog, Thursday, March 19, 2009 12 PM

Search and social media guru John Battelle lashes out at analysts from Sanford Bernstein who claim in a New York Timesarticle that monetizing Twitter "would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful." Their claim is that subscription fees are out of the question, ad revenues would likely be minimal, and that people who sign up for free services tend to resent companies trying to make money from the business later.

Well, "If it was easy, everyone would do it," Battelle replies, adding that he can pinpoint at least three "major potential revenue streams" for Twitter. They are: "Tweetsense" -- an AdWords and AdSense like platform for Twitter that has "major scale potential"; branded licensing, where Twitter could promote certain tweets and get licensing fees; and SMS deals with the major carriers to promote mobile tweeting.

"Analysts who write stuff like this are clearly not thinking very hard about the potential of services like Twitter, nor do they understand the appetite for risk the venture capitalists backing such ideas have," Battelle says, adding, "the idea of the tweet as the query, the idea of brands wanting to have a commercial 'response' to searches (and tweets) on Twitter, these are not small ideas. The idea of real time search, conversational and social search, real time 'AdWords' -- these are not minor new wrinkles. They are here to stay."

Read the whole story at John Battelle’s Searchblog »