Yesterday, Twitter announced an advertising model to start creating revenue for the service that’s grown to 50 million tweets a day without a business model. Firms, at first limited to a few partners like Best Buy, Starbucks and Virgin America, will be able to buy “Promoted Tweets” which will appear on the site’s search results pages, with only one such tweet being shown at a time.

Although Twitter co-founder Biz Stone calls it “non-traditional” in his blog post, the model sounds very similar to Google. Tying ads to only searches will help to avoid upsetting the user base: you won’t see the ads unless you use Twitter to search for something. And at the same time, the advertisers will have at least a vague idea of what you’re interested in.

After having taken such a long time to think of a revenue model that “puts users first, amplifies existing value, and generates profit“, I expected Twitter to come up with something way different than this. I anticipated them not to resort to an advertising model for revenue, and instead go for something that would’ve involved the users in paying for the service.

That kind of system shouldn’t be created by suddenly forcing users to pay for the basic functionality they now get for free, but by carefully investigating what sort of new premium features the most active Twitter users would be willing to pay for, and combining that with a system that would allow users to earn and give credit for the things they do on Twitter. I myself, as an example of a pretty active Twitter user, wouldn’t be excited to pay for the tweets I send, but if I could get new and effective tools for finding more like-minded people to follow me, I could be willing to pay for that. I could also pay for the ability of setting up custom groups for tweeters, and I could see some media companies and journalists, reportedly using Twitter more and more often as a source, be willing to pay for special features tailored to their needs.

With a credit-earning system in place, the average Twitter user who wants to use a premium feature wouldn’t necessarily need to flash out his credit card every time he wants access to premium features. Instead, he could use credits that he’s earned by doing things like favoriting tweets and recommending users to others. Such a system would help drive the further growth of Twitter as well as support the existing ecosystem, where many additional features have already been introduced through 3rd party apps, mashups and community-driven innovation.

Of course, building such a system and then growing its value would take time. It seems evident that some investors and monitors have grown frustrated to wait for Twitter to find a way to start making money for all the publicity and millions of users the service has attracted. It feels like Twitter’s had to press the panic button and come up with a solution that will appease the investors for the time being.

But that seems incredibly short-sighted. More and more clearly, the biggest challenge that people are facing in the digital age is that it will, if it hasn’t already, disrupt the traditional business models of so many industries from advertising to entertainment to communications to all media in general. People are forced to look for entirely new models to nurture both business and usefulness online, and in the long term, only those who embrace this current time of uncertainty as a real opportunity and dream up something bigger than just a slightly modified copy of the old will truly succeed.

In the music business, record labels all complain about how illegal file sharing and new digital distros are killing their business. But this graph shows that while labels are seeing their profits diminish, artists and promoters are experiencing growth in the amount of money they make from live performances. Digital distribution has opened the door for thousands of small, independent artists who in the past didn’t have that much chance to get discovered.

I’m not saying that the future of the music industry is entirely in free file sharing or that it would be easy for Twitter, or any other service, to build a complex system that manages to both credit users for their actions and make real money at the same time. But I’m saying that look left or right, up or down, it’s evident that there is a big change taking place, and that change will require us to completely rethink our approach to a lot of the business we do now. Twitter’s advertising model doesn’t look like rethinking to me. Instead, it looks like reusing and slightly repurposing something that’s already been used. And they’re doing it at a time when the world calls for something much bigger than that.

Karri Ojanen