p2pnet news view | Advertising:- Has ever an application had the kind of free PR as that enjoyed by Twitter?

Short is tweet and at maximum allowable characters of 140 for a message, it doesn’t get much shorter.

And now it’s received an endorsement from The Almighty, or from one of his principal reps, at the least.

“Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, Twitter or e-mail every day. Such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another.”

So said Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland, as quoted by the Times of London, and requoted by Advertising Age.

Great, huh? But maybe not.

“That’s a nice sentiment,” says Simon Dumenco in the story, but, he continues, “Twitter really doesn’t need more users around the world tweeting in ways that can never be monetized.”

Ah SO! The Prayer for Money.

“Ireland’s got just 4 million Catholics, but the Vatican counts more than a billion baptized Catholics worldwide,” says the story, and, “If the pope endorsed tweeting prayer, Twitter could be out of business by the end of the year! The 3-year-old company, remember, still lacks a revenue model and just burns through more venture capital every time a new user signs up. (Fortunately, given how retro-conservative Pope Benedict is, he seems more likely to issue a papal encyclical condemning Twitter. We all know it’s more likely to enable sin — pride! sloth! — than piety.)”

Emma Hartley picks it up in The Telegraph, saying Twitter $ Troubles point up the challenge facing the newspaper industry.

Referring to the Advertising Age item, YouTube and Twitter are, “believed to be losing money hand over fist, currently surviving only on the largesse of venture capitalists and Google (which recently bought YouTube despite it being loss-making),” she says, going on »»»

Zillions of hits every day, the confidence of their users and unrivalled niches on the internet have apparently failed so far to create the conditions for monetisation (the dread word).

That’s what newspapers are up against. It’s a cultural problem. YouTube is indispensible for viral marketers, the music industry and people who love videos of cute fluffy creatures being tickled. Yet there are very few adverts on it – not even the bog standard Google ones, which is really quite hard to understand. Surely if people are prepared to put up with ads on Facebook they wouldn’t mind on YouTube, especially if it were a “use it or lose it” situation.

I don’t really know about Twitter because I haven’t used it (although a cursory glance suggests there may be some scope for international government sponsorship – China? North Korea? – by building subliminal messages into the patterns on those kooky backgrounds). But the amount of experimental tampering that people would be prepared to put up with in order to keep YouTube must be quite considerable.

The question at this end is to what extent the same applies to online newspapers?

“Abbey Klassen, Ad Age’s digital editor, tells me that she once heard a Facebook exec joke to an agency exec, ‘Didn’t you know we’re a nonprofit’?” says Dumenco in Advertising Age, continuing »»»

I’ll go one step further: They’re socialists! OK, yes, I’m using the dumbed-down definition of socialism championed by numbskulls like Sarah Palin, but regardless of the finer points of economic theory, you’ve got to admit that at some level the boys at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are actively choosing to redistribute the wealth. They’re taking money from venture capitalists and deploying it so that millions of people far beyond Silicon Valley can get something for nothing. Entertainment, information, and self-marketing opportunities, mostly.

And, oh yeah, a sense of “connectedness” — cyber companionship — which makes this particular era of VC-wealth distribution all the more … touching. (Let’s all be friends — on someone else’s dime! Let’s all be perpetually jacked into the hyper-insta-now global hivemind of human consciousness — for free!)

I am so appreciative. Seriously. I love YouTube, I’ve made some interesting connections through Facebook, and I enjoy Twittering. (Last week, for instance, I tweeted about an astonishing bit of information I came across in Britain’s Daily Telegraph: YouTube “reportedly uses as much bandwidth as the entire internet took up in 2000.”)

But I also know it can’t go on like this. The digital Robin Hoods can’t keep redistributing the wealth forever, because eventually the wealth runs out. Investors get sick of propping up private ventures that don’t have viable business models, and shareholders of public companies, like Google, get cranky about flushing cash down the drain.

So what can we do?” – he asks, adding:

“Not much, I suppose, other than enjoy it while it lasts — and maybe twitter a prayer for VCs everywhere.”

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

Advertising Age – The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism, May 4, 2009
The Telegraph – YouTube is losing money hand over fist, says Credit Suisse. As is Twitter, May 6, 2009