Twitter announced today that they will be monetizing in another new way.  They have started the @earlybird account.  This account, will (for a small price) tweet about the time bound deals your company is offering.  The concept is pretty creative and should result in some serious revenue for Twitter, especially if they can get influential people to follow @earlybird and retweet the message to their followers.

I am sure the good folks at Twitter have done their research, but it does leave me a bit concerned.  The problem, as I see it, is that Twitter is monetizing on top of their platform rather then monetizing the platform itself.  If you’re monetizing on top of the platform you don’t really have a competitive advantage, unless you disallow competition (which they have).  Disallowing competition though, means that the platform won’t benefit from competition amongst ad providers, which in and of itself hurts the platform.  How much do you think Alexander Graham Bell made off the telephone?

So do I have an alternative?  I’m glad you asked.  What if they required all companies that serve commercials to use a particular hash tag or URL shortener.  Then you tax those per display.  In this manner you’re monetizing the platform itself rather than trying to monetize on top of it (and either losing competitive advantage or stifling the kind of competition that would be good for your platform).