This business plan is just announced in Japan, by a company called GD MOBILE. This article says GD MOBILE is the company operate Twitter JP, but I thought Japanese version of Twitter was run by Digital Garage?

They have been developing their platform for it, they’ll launch their service on January 2010.

There are 2 services.

サービスとしては「有料つぶやきサービス」と「コンテンツ課金」を提供する予定。有料つぶやきサービスは、ユーザーが既存のアカウントを月額課金方式にで きるようにするもので、課金方式は100円～1000円の月額課金と100円～1000円の個別課金から選べる。

コンテンツ課金は、Twitterを通じて情報やコンテンツを販売するための仕組みを提供するもの。月額課金に対応し、手数料は30％を予定している。決済についてはキャリア課金やクレジット、コンビニ決済などを使えるようにする予定だ。

(via CNet Japan)

1. pay per tweet ???

I’m not sure if my understanding is correct, but from this explanation sounds like so? User can change their account to paid account, price will be 100 – 1,000 yen per month, or 100 – 1,000 yen per tweet…. not sure how it works.

2. Sell tweets – 30% charge

I understand this business model, OK. For celebrities etc, they can sell their tweets, and pay 30% of it to the platform operator. Does anybody want to buy my tweets? It’s worth paying! …. maybe no… orz

Personally, I don’t see any reason to use “Japanese version” of twitter. API is the same, platform is the same, the only difference is the ADs on the website. How many people use twitter via website? If you use twitter clients, it doesn’t make any sense to chose Japanese version or English version…

anyway, maybe only for the registration step, it makes sense.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite