Enough people seem to think so, if Twitter’s rising share price is any indication. But is the market “wrong” on this one? After all, if given a choice, who really wants to waste time following “sponsored” (i.e. paid) tweets?
The larger question is this: is there an effective and “cool” way of solving the inherent tension between the need to commercialize or monetize nominally “free” websites like Twitter and Facebook on the one hand and a website’s level of hipness and utility to its users on the other hand?
prior probability, for one, still remains skeptical, though Google and gmail are good counter-examples.
prior probability 
I think sites like twitter, Facebook and instagram can be monetized and yet still maintain an air of “hipness” in doing so by allowing users to select the ads they want to see. A few weeks ago I noticed that instagram released a notice stating that ads would soon become a part of our daily feed. I have not seen any ads yet, but i assume there must have been an uproar against having to follow ads without a choice. Once these networks decide to establish ads in a user’s daily newsfeed I think that they would prompt the user to choose from a wide selection of ads that they want to follow. Further, these ads should provide incentive to follow them by offering discount codes that only followers will have access to as a reward for following. This will provide an effective and “cool” way of solving the inherent tension between the need to commercialize or monetize nominally “free” websites in my opinion.
Dude! That is a brilliant solution to the problem posed in the main section above … in addition, the element of choice would give ad agencies an incentive to work even harder to design ever more creative ads that people would actually want to see … (now, if we could only improve the quality and entertainment value of lawyer ads, that would be something!)
Yes! If these advertising companies were smart they would reach out to their larger clients and begin doing this now. I think it could become very lucrative for as agencies and businesses because I already following many clothing smaller clothing boutiques on Instagram. If larger companies/organizations began offering advertising with discount incentives it could change a lot in social media.