Today Steve Rubel points out that Twitter is probably racking up SMS fees on the international tweets. He also points out that the site does not appear to be monetized now and that could be a problem. So building on my Future of Twitter post from yesterday, let’s look at how Twitter might monetize a partnership with a big company. Take the Starbucks example. Let’s assume that there are 20,000 people on Twitter who have added Starbucks as a Friend in order to get a few promotions a week – e.g. a free cookie with your coffee, a free tall coffee, etc. If Twitter charged Starbucks a few cents per tweet per follower, the revenue from Starbucks might looks something like this:

20,000 followers
10 tweets (promotions) per week
$.05 cents per tweet for each follower (maybe more???)
that’s $10 K per week or about $40K per month

If you sign up 100-200 companies doing something similar then we’re talking some real revenue. Probably more than enough to offset those international SMS fees.