James Siminoff

Twitter’s biggest asset

Since Twitter has launched there has been a lot of talk about how do you moentize it.  Over the last few weeks for me it became very clear on how I would do it, by creating a marketplace for Twitter ID’s.  I have seen people write about this idea before but my recent needs have made me believe that this model is the right one.

For example, right now I own www.grid.com.  I would also like to have @grid for Twitter.  The guy who now owns that twitter ID seems like a nice guy, has 97 followers and has the name because his last name is Grider.  However from Twitter (the companies) perspective it would be much better to have me paying $99 a month for that name and move Mr. Grider to some other name.

Would this piss people off, for sure.  Would it create a massive uproar, for sure.  But if you do it in the right way Twitter could easily rent a few hundred thousand names.  I know that I would buy 2 right now, PhoneTag and Grid for $100 per month if it was offered.

100,000 names multiplied by $100 per month equals $120 million per year in sales.

I really believe that Twitters best chance at making real money would be to stay away from the ad model and more towards a real estate one.