Any social media platform's success and subsequent monetization is based on active user engagement-the people who are registered and frequently log in. However, Twitter's novel approach seems to be keen to change all that.
On Thursday, Twitter announced a new pilot programme that would allow them to make money off of the 500 million people who view and even browse through twitter every month, but never sign in. With a majority of Twitter's registered users' tweets being public, these ghost-like 500 million people are a mix of people who browse the social media site's user profiles and home page without logging in and those who see tweets embedded in Google's search.
Since Twitter went public in November 2013 with a massively successful IPO, it has struggled to impress investors and shareholders with sagging stock prices and more importantly, user-base growth largely stagnating at around 300 million.
Now, Twitter has decided to completely change their approach and look at what it calls the "total twitter audience", placing more importance on views than active engagement. This is something similar to the model that is used by YouTube which makes its adverts visible to anyone who views videos uploaded on the platform, regardless of point of access.
Similarly, Twitter will now make sponsored tweets and other advertising visible to anyone accessing the microblogging platform, substantially increasing eyeballs and becoming a lot more attractive and valuable space for advertisers.
Twitter has been planning this move for a while now with a mention of it in their shareholder meet last November and the idea has seemed to find traction as Twitter's stock price shot up by 7 per cent at the back of the announcement.
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Simar Singh is one of the youngest members of the BW team. A fresh graduate from IIMC, she also holds a degree in political science from LSR. She enjoys covering power, startups, lifestyle and a little bit of tech.
