I was thinking this morning about the new Twitter ads, and i’m sure they’ll take off. But I think there’s another revenue stream which Twitter could be investigating which could make them many, many millions.

One of the frustrations for search marketers with Twitter is those pesky short urls. They just don’t provide any link love. Redirects through Bit.ly, and “nofollow” attribute in the link source code combine to ensure that beyond direct traffic driving, the links are worthless in search marketing terms. That’s a whole load of lost link love.

Recently Bit.ly launched their ‘pro’ service, which allows brands to create their own short url, which for vanity purposes is nice (Techcrunch use one, along with about 6,000 other brands). It’s pretty smooth… try typing the http://techcrunch.com domain into Tweetdeck to see it in action, but it still does nothing to boost page rank whilst the links are “nofollow”.

So here’s my model I’d implement if I was at the helm:

1. Twitter launches it’s own version of Bit.ly pro, which brands can sign up to and get their own shortened url (including actually purchasing one on the site) for a small annual fee.
2. All paying customers shortened, branded urls become “follow” links ensuring the paying customers get some link love to their websites
3. Twitter charges for any clicks on those links on a cost per click basis, and sits back and watches the dollars roll in

For Twitter to do this, they’d need to cut the cord with Bit.ly… wait a minute.. what’s this on Techcrunch yesterday?!

Watch this space…