Twitter Plans Premium Accounts By End of Year

Twitter aims to introduce premium accounts for brands and businesses by the end of the year, according to co-founder and CEO Biz Stone. Speaking at a Nesta panel event alongside celebrity Tweeter Stephen Fry in London this morning, Stone said his company’s plan was to charge for corporate accounts in exchange for enhanced features and analytics.

“We want to present to [businesses] a layer of features to help make them better at Twitter, and share some of the analytics,” he said.

In response to questions from Fry on the possibility of “flashing banners and buttons” on the site, Stone implied the introduction of traditional display ad formats, and even Google-esque text ads, was unlikely, adding, “the plan has always been to create a [revenue] model that would be native to Twitter.”

Fry himself, who has now reached over a million followers on the social network, expressed his own frustration at the brands already making use of the service, stating previously that companies on Twitter could “go hang” as far as he was concerned.

He later said he didn’t intend to be “anti-commercial,” but that if Twitter becomes “annoying to users” and there was “a sense of being guided by a big corporate brother,” the company risks alienating its user base.