Jeff Nolan askes an interesting question: What do you think, can a twitter stream be monetized via subscription?
Celebrities can and I am convinced will within the next 6 months. It is such a low hanging fruit. Lance Armstrong could easily charge $5 a month and thousands of his almost 300K followers would sign up to be part of his life.
Celebs can turn the price wheel to make it more or less exclusive.
Twitter enable that functionality and take a little cut, that would be a nice revenue stream.
You can take it even further. How much would you pay for someone to follow you? Lance is following 39 people at the moment. For many people it would be enormously valuable to be #40 I think up to #100.
It would be a direct monetizing of fame, leaving out the tabloid middleman.
Of the people I follow personally I would pay for Tim O’Reilly’s tweets. They are high signal, engaging and mostly in the areas of my interest. Thankfully I am convinced that will never happen.