I think people will be unwilling to pay at all, or the price will be driven so low that it is negligible. I can only think of a handful pay-for-answers services, and all of them have failed.<p>Furthermore, 140 characters is quite a restriction. By allowing only simple questions, the payments will be respectively low. Getting 10% of $0.10 questions isn't a way to make money - even at high volumes. They could have easily used their large user base for something that is much more profitable.<p>I don't believe Twitter has problems thinking of monetization methods. It's a specific problem where they want to 1) not alienate their existing users, 2) scale to their entire user base or large subset of their user base, 3) and make enough money that it's worthwhile. The sheer scale of the number of users makes it difficult to navigate, since any change will probably piss off large groups of users (look at fb, and the recent @reply fiasco).<p>Personally, I don't feel like a premium answers system will fulfill 1) or 3).