Studying the impact of innovation on business and society

The Internet is More Biology Than Technology: The Top 10 Ways to Monetize Twitter

At the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch, industry pioneers and pundits discussed the state and future of the Real-Time Web also increasingly referred to as the “now” Web.

When it comes to search, the most notable comparison between traditional and real-time discovery is represented in the difference between human memory and consciousness. The experience of searching for relevant information is personified in the context of what you’re doing and not necessarily that of what you’re typing into the search box. And according to Edo Segal, Investor and founder of Relegance,”The Internet is more biology than technology.”

I agree. Outside of the realm of search, I’ve also professed that Social Media is less represented by technology and more defined through digital anthropology.

It’s about connecting people to information and those sharing it. The social relationships formed through real-time search and interaction bolsters the real value online, over the very links that are considered the governing currency of the Web.

The patterns for real-time search offer an augmented reality, mapping who we are on the Internet. We’re bound by synchronous interaction and influenced by the liveliness of every experience. Through this activity and synchronicity, new applications are emerging to foster collaboration and communication.

The constructs of what, where, how, and to whom we communicate and share information is converging through an aggregated view of related activity and a syndicated architecture designed to extend and amplify our voice.

When it comes to savvy, proven, and incredibly successful tech investors, Ron Conway is a legend. He has a gift or an uncanny sense of shrewdness, or a fusion of both, to identify the real opportunities that will transform into successful exits and also fuel and inspire aggressive innovation in the process.

To help entrepreneurs, startups, and industry leaders capitalize on this tremendous opportunity, Ron Conway offered his vision for the Top 10 ways to monetize real-time conversations:

10. Lead generation
9. Coupons
8. Analytics, analyzing the data
7. Enterprise CRM
6. Payments
5. Commerce
4. User-authentication, verifying accounts
3. Syndication of new ads
2. Advertising – Context and display ads
1. Acquiring followers

According to Conway, if you add these up, initial estimates equate to roughly $5 billion. In comparison to traditional monetization in search, Google earns about $20 billion in ads per year.

What do you think?

To view additional pictures from the Real-Time Stream event, please visit my album on Flickr.


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85 COMMENTS ON THIS POST To “The Internet is More Biology Than Technology: The Top 10 Ways to Monetize Twitter”

  1. Tim Aldiss says:

    In regards to your compelling analogy on memory bs conciousness – to my mind we have to be very careful how we rely on real time search without referencing what is already stored in, as it were, in memory. As a general observation (and speaking as a former knowledge manager) humans as a species have a very short term memory! Real time search won’t improve this. My fears are that it will lead to more hasty, less researched assumptions.

    • brian says:

      Tim, excellent comment. There is also concern that Twitter is leading to hasty, unemotional responses – because we move to quickly to truly feel what passes before us. (I am no in this camp, but there are interesting studies out there.)

  2. Mark says:

    how’d we jump from fifty cents to $5 billion?

  3. InternetStrategist says:

    The best thing that ever happened for businesses of all sizes was the original pay per click (ppc) advertising (prior to expanded broad match making the ads less targeted and less economically feasible). What any Social Networking site should already be doing is making the very best of their user-generated content easy to locate and allowing only the most relevant ads to be purchased via ppc by businesses.

    Just as AdWords makes up the majority of Google's income those ads could generate a handsome income. We could hope that, unlike Google, Yahoo, etc., keeping those ads highly relevant at rates that make financial sense to even small businesses would stay a priority.

    I have written more about these concepts in posts about the Golden Days of PPC, why you can NOT rely on organic search, and on monetizing Twitter and other Social Media using targeted advertising.

  4. GrowMap says:

    The best thing that ever happened for businesses of all sizes was the original pay per click (ppc) advertising (prior to expanded broad match making the ads less targeted and less economically feasible). What any Social Networking site should already be doing is making the very best of their user-generated content easy to locate and allowing only the most relevant ads to be purchased via ppc by businesses.

    Just as AdWords makes up the majority of Google's income those ads could generate a handsome income. We could hope that, unlike Google, Yahoo, etc., keeping those ads highly relevant at rates that make financial sense to even small businesses would stay a priority.

    I have written more about these concepts in posts about the Golden Days of PPC, why you can NOT rely on organic search, and on monetizing Twitter and other Social Media using targeted advertising.

  5. Just as AdWords makes up the majority of Google's income those ads could generate a handsome income. We could hope that, unlike Google, Yahoo, etc., keeping those ads highly relevant at rates that make financial sense to even small businesses would stay a priority.

  6. Payday Loans says:

    A few examples: in 1998, Google indexed 26 million web-pages, today it indexes 1 trillion; Within only five years, Facebook and MySpace have attracted each more than 100 million users world wide; user-generated content such as YouTube produced more than 73 billion streams in 2008; with around four billion mobile users world wide, the Internet is becoming more and more mobile and capable to support a range of new applications and services that were not foreseen in its original design.

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