Whose tweets would you pay to access?

The story out of Twitterdom today is that Twitter Japan has hatched a monetization plan. You can read about it by following either or both of these links.

Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January

Twitter Japan Will Allow Users to Charge for Access to Their Tweets

The second story has a little bit more detail in terms of how payments would work. I tweeted this after reading the first one this morning:

Thinking about it, Twitter’s plan to charge for access to premium tweets might be the best way to gauge influence and authority.

After reading the second one a short while ago, I tweeted this:

In light of the Twitter/Japan monetization speculation, if it came to it, of all the people you follow, who would you pay to access?

Influence and authority are hot topics in the social media sphere right now. They have been for a while, but they are getting even more word count, and opinion rendered, as each day goes by. The new List feature that Twitter unveiled has really fueled a lot of those discussions. The measurements used to track influence and authority, in Twitter terms, have been the number of followers you have, the number of people you follow, the correlation percentage wise between those two, the number of re-tweets you garner, how many lists you have and how many lists you appear on.

In other words, it’s a numbers game. Twitter’s Suggested Users List, headed for the dumper shortly, but seen by all new Tweeters, gave the people on it an enormous advantage in terms of follower numbers, arguably the biggest gauge of influence. That pissed a lot of people off. People who probably thought that they ought to have been on it. Or at least, ought to have been on it instead of, you know, so and so.

But charging for access to tweets? That’s a game changer. At least insofar as the way Twitter is currently structured. I can see the scenario where a tweeter has both free and premium content, but let’s not go there yet. Let’s just stick with the premium content for now.

Whose tweets would you pay to read? A few people? A lot of people? Would you pay per tweet read or pay for the entire stream? How much of the content that you consume on Twitter would you pay for?

This is surely where the rubber meets the road in terms of influence. Kutcher can have millions of followers now. How many would pay to read what he says? How about Robert Scoble? How about Chris Brogan? And what about all of the businesses that are using Twitter as a marketing and advertising vehicle? Are you going to pay for those tweets?

The stories I linked to earlier point out that most of Twitter usage in Japan is mobile and that they are used to paying for mobile content. That could very well be. If it’s successful there, will they institute it here? And if so, will you pay? And if you don’t, are they shooting themselves in the foot?

What do you think? I’m very curious to know whose tweets you would and wouldn’t pay to read and follow. I’m still trying to decide…