Twitter monetisation woes
For some time now Twitter has been slowly but steadily moving towards a monetisation model. Their latest move is the Quick Bar.
Introduced to Twitters iPhone app, the Quick Bar annoyingly resides at the top of your feed, overlaying your tweets. At the moment the bar scrolls through trending and promoted topics. This is one of the most obvious moves by Twitter into monetising their iOS apps. Users are not happy. Quick Bar now being referred to as dickbar.
One of the difficulties they will always have is the fact that users access Twitter from such a wide range of 3rd party apps. A good move on Twitter’s part was to purchase the popular 3rd party application Tweetie. Not only did they offer the app for free, but they have continually improved it with updates. Here comes the part where they introduce their monetisation strategy.
This is one of those tough situations where Twitter will need to make a stand, or try find another way to monetise their business. I think the Quick Bar (or some variant) will be here to stay. At the end of the day, money needs to be made. It’s a shame the current solution is to the detriment of their users.