Twitter just became even more like a cable company

If Twitter's biggest challenge is attracting new users to its service and showing investors it's capable of competing with the likes of Facebook, the company's latest move seems to take direct aim at fixing that problem. Twitter is beginning to offer individual users and entities the chance to make money off the videos they post, according to reports. And the terms look pretty favorable to content creators, who will get to take home 70 percent of the ad dollars from their videos. That's somewhat more money than what YouTube or Facebook offer.

In rolling out the change, Twitter moves another step closer to a business model that has defined another industry for about three decades. As anyone who has a cable subscription knows, it isn't Time Warner Cable or Cox that actually make the programming you find in your lineup. Instead, companies like ESPN and HBO produce shows that they then market to distributors. What the folks at Twitter (and to a similar extent, Facebook and YouTube) have done is to graft this model onto the new Internet economy.