by Lynette Alice

Created on: June 12, 2010

There are some analysts that say Twitter is finally on the way to killing itself. The technology isn’t the problem, nor is it any legal issue. The problem as some see it is greed. While twitter has done quite well building a community of users and casual followers of immense proportions, at its heart, Twitter is a business and it only exists to make money - not amuse the masses by allowing the constant exchange of information.

To that end, placed ads have served Twitter well. When something is trending hot, Twitter cashes in by getting increased ad revenue rates. They can both charge a higher placement rate, and earn more based on the PPM. Now however, that is enough to keep the Twitter executives happy - they need more. Nobody is faulting Twitter for trying to find ways to increase revenue, what they are worried about is the way they are planning to increase revenue.

 Twitter wants to sell trends now. This is a matter of actually allowing a company, or individual, to buy a placement on the trends list. Rather than actually draw traffic the traditional way, an entity can simply pay whatever the rate is Twitter sets and automatically appear as a top trend. This has raised several issues of concern from nearly every corner.

Corporations like and dislike it at the same time. They like the idea they can exploit it if needed, but conversely they dislike the idea that their competitors can do the same. A company like BP could conceivably have purchased trend slots to post feel good tweets about their oil spill cleanup efforts or corporate image. In a similar vein, some companies adore the idea that they can use it to artificially hype basically any product, promotion, or notion they want to almost instantly.

So far non-corporate Tweeters have not been quite so enthusiastic. Some comments are not really fit to reprint in most venues expressing how they feel. It is speculated that some Tweeples may begin completely ignoring the trends page, or even worse visit the trends page to see who purchased a placement and then mercilessly bash them.

Twitter can call them “Promoted Tweets”, but some Tweeples are calling it fraud. Forced trending is almost a near certain reality regardless of what the common user feels about it. The bottom line is that corporations can dump five figures or more at a time to promote a tweet without batting an eye and the average user cannot. As one analyst pointed out however, Twitter may want to take some time to seriously re-think this, because although average users may lack the money for promoted tweets, they are who really makes Twitter work, and if they are alienated - there is no twitter.

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