I’m sure it’s been said before but if Twitter wants to get away from advertising, this action seems like such a wasted opportunity.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this.
From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model.
Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point.
I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too.
APIs should not be revenue generators! I don't mind companies charging for an API, either to cover the costs of service or to encourage efficient behavior. But Twitter and now Reddit seem more like they are rent seeking with their APIs and it's just not going to work out well. Particularly galling since they're effectively charging to access all this content that users generated for free.
The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
It’s kind of insane that the third-party client situation lasted the way it did for so long. Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years.
I exclusively used Tweetbot, and checking out the first-party clients this weekend confirms to me that they’re still pretty bad. But I knew that eventually this day was coming. Twitter never made properly supporting third party clients a priority, by either finding a way to charge for access or finding a way to ensure ads were in the feeds. It couldn’t keep going the way it was, and obviously Elon has no interest in devoting any time/attention to it.
As someone who uses Twitter's APIs heavily, this is both encouraging, and slightly terrifying.
We draw down a lot of data from Twitter. Obviously, we always want more data,
so we got in contact with GNIP to see what we could afford (which, in itself took a long time). As it turns out its incredibly expensive, and as a very early startup, we couldn't afford any of their plans. We had no option but to fall back to their standard, free APIs and make do.
There are plenty of people who would happily pay good amounts of money for access to more Twitter data - there really are a million uses for it - however Twitter's current prices are far too high for anything other than a VC funded Silicon Valley startup to afford. I hate to think how many potential startups and cool projects have been killed off instantly simply because Twitter's prices are insane. You can get real-time global stock market tick data for a year for less than Twitter charge per month for access to the decahose.
So, I'm glad to see Twitter being more open about their future plans, and really happy to see they're moving towards a more self-service paid API for those than want and can afford it. I just hope they make it affordable and don't kill off too much in the process. The last thing they need is to upset a lot of developers, again.
Twitter's API has always been something they've not leveraged enough. All they had to do was keep it open, find a way of serving adds through 3rd party clients, and I suspect there would have been an explosion of good clients that could have made Twitter much easier to use for people who just can't figure Twitter out. Twitter shouldn't be complicated, but it is, and by trying to hold onto the brand as tightly as they have, they've prevented good developers from making easy to use clients that could have brought in users.
I really want Twitter to succeed. I hope this is the start of a turnaround for Twitter.
As someone who uses Twitter's APIs heavily, this is both encouraging, and slightly terrifying.
We draw down a lot of data from Twitter. Obviously, we always want more data,
so we got in contact with GNIP to see what we could afford (which, in itself took a long time). As it turns out its incredibly expensive, and as a very early startup, we couldn't afford any of their plans. We had no option but to fall back to their standard, free APIs and make do.
There are plenty of people who would happily pay good amounts of money for access to more Twitter data - there really are a million uses for it - however Twitter's current prices are far too high for anything other than a VC funded Silicon Valley startup to afford. I hate to think how many potential startups and cool projects have been killed off instantly simply because Twitter's prices are insane. You can get real-time global stock market tick data for a year for less than Twitter charge per month for access to the decahose.
So, I'm glad to see Twitter being more open about their future plans, and really happy to see they're moving towards a more self-service paid API for those than want and can afford it. I just hope they make it affordable and don't kill off too much in the process. The last thing they need is to upset a lot of developers, again.
Twitter's API has always been something they've not leveraged enough. All they had to do was keep it open, find a way of serving adds through 3rd party clients, and I suspect there would have been an explosion of good clients that could have made Twitter much easier to use for people who just can't figure Twitter out. Twitter shouldn't be complicated, but it is, and by trying to hold onto the brand as tightly as they have, they've prevented good developers from making easy to use clients that could have brought in users.
I really want Twitter to succeed. I hope this is the start of a turnaround for Twitter.
Charging for API usage isn't as profitable as selling your users to advertisers. Otherwise twitter would already be living just off of selling the firehose.
This is where twitter screwing over third party developers comes in to play. I would have preferred if twitter main feed was sequential and then there were thriving third party alternatives to it. Twitter could have easily monetised by taking a slice of ad revenue from third party developers, or by charging API fees to them.
One thing Twitter might have tried would have been to allow users to pay $8 to unlock high quality API access for any apps they want to use. Serious and professional Twitter users likely want to use more advanced tooling than Twitter offers to manage their own accounts. Let them pay for premium service.
Integration developers could then develop advanced features at no cost to themselves (other than developer time), and their users could pay Twitter to enable them.
Of course, Twitter has already mostly burned that bridge by devaluing the API.
I can only see Twitter beginning to monetize third-party API access with some subscription plan whilst keeping the Twitter app free of charge (and protected with captchas, anti-botting tools, etc)
Either way, this demonstrates that it makes no sense to build an entire company soley on someone else's API.
Twitter needs to stop fucking around and charge for their API (with metered pricing). Currently, their incentives are to restict access to save money and bandwidth. If they charge money, their incentives will be the opposite: encourage as many developers to use as much as possible. It'll suck for the casual developer that wants to build a free app on the Twitter platform, but it's clear that there's enough demand for the platform that is has some value.
What Twitter did was install rate limits on free access to the API. This means that to provide a full-service 3rd party client, the app developer has to pay Twitter to get above the rate limits.
So: if your 3rd party app is not showing ads (as most don't), Twitter is still getting some revenue from the app developer.
Personally, to me this seems like a reasonable trade off.
But a lot of 3rd party app developers could not afford to pay those fees, and so lost their businesses. You can see how that would piss them off. But from Twitter's perspective, they were just freeloaders.
I think the motivation here is that Twitter is charging about half a million dollars a year for access to their API when it was previously either free or close to free.
Is this where I can complain about Twitters Ad API still not being available to the general public?
You can build some amazing tools with the APIs Google and Facebook give you, but Twitter is off-limits unless you're an invited partner, of which there are only a handful (I think.)
They seem a little too content to keep it restricted.
And to at least make my missive vaguely related to your post - surely they'd get a lot of interesting ideas on how to revolutionize advertising if they allowed open experimentation.
It seems to me that, as Twitter goes the monetization route, these kind of changes only make more sense. They could have taken the option to charge developers for accessing their API's. But that would slow innovation.
So, it was only natural that they would look to create a larger piece of the pie for themselves while also trying to make it possible for developers to continue to be successful. Yes, that means that we, the developers, are now being forced to compete with them which seems like a non-starter. However, they are still providing an API for us to use which allows us to continue to compete.
In the end, dare I say it, they become Microsoftian in their API evolution; they use the API without releasing it to us and develop such a headstart that it is impossible for us to compete when the API is made public. If that happens, oh well. It was free and fun while it lasted.
Just because Twitter couldn't figure out how to monetize their APIs? Please. They could have made some premium before. They could have forced ads in the tweet stream as part of the usage requirements for the APIs etc.
They killed a community due to arrogance. And it backfired big.
But the only reason there is no monetisation via ads and other “innovations” in these apps is because Twitter have deliberately degraded the APIs and not kept them current with the official site/app for a decade now.
Twitter could also start charging app devs for API licenses, or restrict 3rd party apps to Twitter blue users if they want to change things up.
I don't think that Twitter Inc. likes any 3rd party Twitter apps anymore cause these don't let them show their Dickbar and whatever will come to the official apps.
You know what I think? There is ONE solution to pass this problem: Integrate such things into the API so EVERY client has to show the Dickbar. This sounds like the logical next level.
As bad as it sounds I think they have some good points about that cause, you know, they want to make some money and integrate some annoying stuff to the official apps. 3rd party apps don't have these kind of annoying things and that means they don't earn a PENNY from those "assholes" BUT they are earning money from their apps which uses the Twitter API.
I know this sounds crazy but I think that's exactly what Twitter is thinking about. They want people to use their official Apps BUT if they use other Apps these MUST HAVE the Dickbar (or whatever) too so Twitter earns money.
Lets see in which direction this will go BUT I have to admit that this "letter" to developers is fucking sharp.
I don't _really_ get it. Wouldn't it have been easier to work with these platforms and mandate that they show promoted tweets the same as the official app? I imagine Elon also downsized the official app teams so why not outsource some of that work to third parties and let them figure out monetization?
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this.
From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model.
Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point.
I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too.
Oh well. I suppose Elon knows what he is doing.
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