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Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

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Re: Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

#11

Post by ivey »

trickjarrett wrote: post #7

Your stats are unfortunately pretty small when it comes to advertising dollars. The fact is that Twitter doesn't lend itself to monetizing on the messages itself, and as that is how your bot operates that makes it quite difficult. Twitter spam is pretty unwelcome in general, the "friending" (when users follow each other) is treated as a pact not to create noise. I think given time it will become more acceptable as Tw…

Or sell ads yourself the old fashioned way, and call them sponsors. Send 1 message a day, thanking them with a short message and a link.

Re: Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

#12

Post by pb30 »

trevorturk wrote: post #9

I just started using the service a couple of days ago, and I'm very impressed. Awesome work. I can understand your problem, though. Honestly, I'm not sure that I would pay anything for it, but I'm not a business user or anything - I'm just using it as a slight convenience. So, for me at least, there's not much value. Maybe I'd pay a one-time fee for some kind of convenience, or to stop ads. I payed $10 for the Instap…

Thanks, I knew it'd be a tough one to monetize, or else I would've done something earlier. Perhaps some sort of donation nag screen on the website would increase the donation rate. It definitely doesn't take a lot of resources to run, but I just wanted to gather some feedback

Re: Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

#13

Post by goodkarma »

Four ideas:

1. Are you getting their e-mail addresses? You could send out some kind of e-mail once a month with a summary of their packages and some ads and/or affiliate offers.

2. Since you are sending them direct messages, they must be following you. Use Magpie or some other service to just post advertisment tweets (not direct messages) to your public timeline. You get paid on a CPM basis.

3. After every nth package, send them a DM asking for a donation if they appreciated the service.

4. License your app to be the official Twitter bot of any of the package tracker services. So if someone tries to track a package on any of their sites it gives them the option to add to your twitterbot. (This one would be the hardest/most work, obviously.)

Re: Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

#14

Post by rrhyne »

You need more traffic. Who has a line on people getting shipped packages? E-commerce sites.

You could develop a plugin for zencart or any of the other major shopping cart systems that lets users plug their twitter name in to get updates. That should bring you lots of traffic. Maybe you could sell that?

That's not real money though, so i'm wondering if each titter message could have a link to more info on the package? This would go to your site, where you can run ads.

Hope that's worth something.

Re: Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

#15

Post by emmett »

pb30 wrote: post #5
emmett wrote: post #3

How many unique users per day do you have? The size of your service really determines the correct course.

~20 new users daily, ~40 new packages daily, ~180 unique users with stuff being tracked, ~150 updates sent out daily

Charge money. Market it to businesses. You're never going to get money out of something like that from advertising, so you have to go the service route.

If you charged $5/user/month, you might have a nice little supplement to your income. Depends if people find it's worth paying for. If not, you're not going to make any money out of it.

Don't bother writing code, just let them paypal you by hand and enable their account by hand.

Re: Ask HN: Monetizing a Twitter bot?

#17

Post by davidhelgason »

"Search for the woman": You know which packages they're sending, where to, and with what providers. Is there a way to help your users save money? And is there a way to make money off that, for example by reselling the shipping services via an affiliate deal like the previous poster suggested?

d.

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