Tweets to Convert to Dollars?

By Shane Craver on October 8, 2009

According to multiple reports, Twitter is in deep negotiation with technology behemoths Microsoft and Google.

The topic is to permit indexing of users’ 140 character Tweets with a portion of the revenue from searches going back to Twitter.

What will Twitter’s community of users get in return for the Twitter / Google / Microsoft partnership? It’s not known at this time however, given Google’s revenue sharing standard with other sites, it’s likely that heavy Tweeters with a large follower base may be able to make a few bucks off of their short and frequent online prose.

Constant Tweeters like NFL player Chad Ochocinco with more than 200,000 followers and a jaw-dropping 8,774 tweets may add another revenue stream to his income arsenal if the Twitter deal goes through and the company builds a revenue component for its users similar to the program created by YouTube.

YouTube, acquired by Google in October of 2006, has experimented with a revenue program for video producers. The program was scaled back several months ago to only include invites for certain popular videos.

The YouTube advertising program has very strict guidelines regarding content, an issue that won’t seem to be an issue for Twitter.

However, with the heavy number of “Tweet spam” and “re-Tweets” any program created by Twitter will need to be monitored closely for fraud and scams.

Twitter, one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the Internet, recently received $100 million in new funding according to Reuters.