Twitter should partner with YouTube

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This just in, according to TechCrunch, Twitter now has almost as many monthly unique visitors as Craigslist.

Well, TechCrunch didn't include Craigslist's visitor statistics in its blog report, I did, but the point is at 44 million unique visitors, Twitter is just shy of Craigslist's 50 million as of May 2009. If there was any question how large Twitter has become, or how important, that stat should answer it.

But with all of this traffic, where's the revenue model? Is it just burning venture capital cash or is there a plan? (Spark Capital's Todd Dagres says there's a money-making plan and his firm has pumped $35 million into Twitter with the confidence the approach will work.) As of this writing, Twitter is free of charge and is devoid of ads. While different approaches have been discussed, here's one I've not seen before.

Partner with YouTube.

In the model I envision, Twitter would allow its users to embed videos by YouTube Partners directly on their profiles. In turn, YouTube would pay Twitter a percentage revenue fee from the traffic generated by Twitter-based YouTube videos. It's a way of allowing Twitter users to "jazz up" their profiles with videos, much as they do with photos, which in some cases are corporate logos anyway.

My point is, Twitter's already becoming commercialized because businesses are establishing pages on it. Having a provision to add video isn't really pushing Twitter in a direction it should not go. I think this provision would be a massive hit, especially in cases where the YouTuber has breaking news on video that then goes viral on Twitter. Moreover popular YouTubers are also in demand on Twitter, like iJustine, one of LA's Top Twitterers, so Twitter become a way to expand the YouTube Partner reach.



I don't know what the overall revenue impact would be on the Twitter, but its certainly a win-win: Twitter doesn't have to worry about additional traffic weight to its servers, and YouTube makes more money from the additional traffic from Twitter that it then shares with Twitter.

So, if you notice Twitter pages having YouTube videos embeded, you know where the idea came from.