TwitPub invents paid Twitter accounts
This was bound to happen: Someone has invented a paid access scheme for Twitter. TwitPub is a marketplace where Twitterers can sell access to their updates, by registering their protected accounts with the service. Other Twitter users sign up and pay for access to these accounts on the TwitPub marketplace. TwitPub takes 20% of the subscription revenues for itself and gives 80% to its publishers.
TwitPub works by gating access to protected Twitter accounts. Once a user pays for access to a Twitter stream, the system sends the author of it an e-mail advising him or her to allow that user to see the updates. (In the future the e-mail loop should be removed.)
Setting up a Twitter account for gated access, in TwitPub
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)
Authors set their own subscription prices, but the floor is $0.99 a month, which is too high. Another snag: Although author payments are sent to Paypal accounts (handy), subscribers must pay by credit card via WorldPay, a payment processing system relatively unknown in the United States. I wanted to test TwitPub, but I wouldn’t even pay for my own updates since I had to hand over my credit card to this processor that I’d never heard of.
But the real question is: Is this for real? Can it possibly work? The logic of the founders is not without merit. I am sure there are some people who would be willing to pay a few pennies to subscribe to regular entertainment (horoscope, gossip) updates or, more likely, financial information like stock tips. The founders believe that since the people pay for access to Premium SMS channels in various countries, it indicates that they’ll also pay for Twitter updates.
