UberTwitter and Monetization in Social Media: It Can’t All Be Free!

The launch of the newest version of UberTwitter was a pretty hot topic in the social media world today. A couple of months back I noted my support for the switch away from TweetDeck to what I feel is clearly this far superior Twitter client for the Blackberry. So I wasn’t surprised at all, but completely shaking my head at the backlash concerning their inclusion of ads in the application with this newest version.

To begin with, it’s clear that UberTwitter made a conscientious effort to keep the integration of advertising as unobtrusive as possible. Client users will find one ad, the same size as any of the thousands of tweets they receive, at the top of their stream.  Upon scrolling down even the slightest, there’s no ad in sight. As you go through the last few hours of tweets, you’re ad free. Only upon refresh of the timeline and looking at the top of your stream will you even notice the advertisement.  Still, this didn’t go over well with the community at large:

It’s incredible really. The idea of getting everything free on the social web has evolved past just an expectation to a true sense of entitlement. Here are a few of questions to ponder for anyone feeling let down by UberTwitter today:

• How is  company like UberTwitter supposed to keep developing such a valuable application with no money to keep a staff going?
• Why would they have jumped in the game to begin with if not for the possibility of monetizing their work at some point?
• and the real question….What’s your proposed solution to keeping such valuable tools in development but saving you the trouble of a little ad at the top of your timeline?

Clearly there’s a bigger discussion at hand here in terms of monetizing what the larger audience expects free, and now ad-free as well. It’s a battle the music industry has been battling for years, with no clear path to daylight in terms of solving the problem.  It only seems like a bigger challenge for the social media space, where start-ups like UberTwitter thrive on originally offering their product for free, thereby cannabalizing market share for anyone else to profit off of.

Will be interesting to see this play out in the long term, but one thing’s clear. It can’t all be free!