Twitter plans to charge premium users

Twitter’s plans to bring in US$140 million in revenue next year include charging users for premium accounts.

The accounts will include detailed analytics and ID verification (so that businesses don’t have to worry about having their brands hijacked by impostors); co-founder Biz Stone told VentureBeat that Twitter is in the “first phase” of rolling out these accounts. 

Twitter is also working on new APIs, or programming languages that companies can use to create apps (like TweetDeck), geared specifically toward business customers; Stone said the commercial APIs would be out later this year.

The goal is to offer enterprises a suite of tools—from the APIs, the account verification and the premium analytics—that they feel justified paying for.

There has been speculation around Twitter’s revenue-generation plans: yesterday I suggested that they were prepping to offer geotargeted ads; board member Todd Chaffee alluded to a potential e-commerce platform, while Kevin Thau, Twitter’s head of mobile business development, hinted at rev-sharing deals with wireless carriers and handset makers for its use as a mobile utility.