They do, and the price is $0.0001 per tweet.<p>Search rate limits through the normal API can be prohibitive for many use cases like news/brand monitoring. Or even citizen monitoring programs for local police. So they resort to datasift and gnip and are charged volume-based amounts on behalf of Twitter. And presumably, at the end of every month, a wire transfer goes out to Twitter.<p>Now that doesn't mean that twitter makes $1 per 10,000 tweets. A license to the tweet is required separately for each end user of those two platforms. So with 1000 datasift users accessing a particular tweet, Twitter is making $0.10 on it. The more people request that tweet the more money Twitter makes. Marginal cost = 0.<p>For more info, check out the Datasift FAQ's:
<a href="http://dev.datasift.com/docs/getting-started/billingfaq#licensefees" rel="nofollow">http://dev.datasift.com/docs/getting-started/billingfaq#lice...</a>
It's because they want to build an advertising business and they don't want to compete with their developers. Twitter as a service is not the business they're in. They want direct access to their audience to increase their chances at monetization.<p>It makes perfect business sense, it just sucks.
Because they ran the numbers. It wouldn't justify the valuation their investors demand, and it would be a distraction. Ads are their only hope. Draw your own conclusions.
Serious question: do people still have any remote desire to give the people behind Twitter money, after all they have pulled and shown themselves to be?
Or, why don't they just interleave ads into the streams and require developers to either display those ads or pay a CPM equivalent to hide them? It seems clear their main concern is around the home_timeline feed anyways, so weaving in their 'sponsored tweets' and requiring developers display them seems straight forward enough.
I would assume that its in the works, but they already slapped developers in the face yesterday with new restrictions, if they added pricing plans on top of that, that would be inhumane and too much for developers to handle in on gulp.<p>Additionally with the pricing, its hard to get right. They won't be able to modify prices as they see fit after they announce them. So it seems like a logical progression: 1 restrict amount of data. 2 next, determine pricing
I don't think charging for API access will make them as much money as they want/need compared to being a media/ad company, that's probably the main reason. But, you're question did prompt me to ask my own:<p>Why doesn't Twitter rev-share their ads with 3rd party devs? <a href="http://gist.io/3383601" rel="nofollow">http://gist.io/3383601</a>
Not quite the same point - but similar thoughts: <a href="http://bit.ly/N9HnAD" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/N9HnAD</a>. What's really missing is a proper service contract. Not giving guarantees - or at best implicit ones will kill ecosystems.