At the beginning of this year, Disruptive Analysis founder Dean Bubley set out on a novel approach to monetising his opinions and research via twitter by establishing @DAPremium, a paid for subscription model for his insight into the mobile industry. This sits alongside his standard (free) feed @disruptivedean, where he publishes other findings which will, he hopes, drive traffic to the premium service.

To access the premium feed, users have to pay online and then get accepted by Dean to follow him - it's a simple development of the "Protected Tweets" privacy setting.

It's such a brilliant model; I'm amazed more people / organisations aren't doing it, (a Swedish charity, Stockholms Stadsmission, which looks to address homelessness in the capital, successfully trialled such a premium service last year also).

I spoke to Dean about his approach and he explained that he puts more company-specific material behind the paywall as well as some elements of his research, and for the subscription price ($100/quarter or $300/year), his premium followers have access to pithier insight than on the free platform. Dean also uses the platform to add value to people buying consulting services or coming to his/Martin Geddes' workshops, and he protects the premium tweets through terms and conditions banning any RTing or forwarding, and also (where feasible) promises subscriber replies to questions posed on the DAPremium feed.

Dean says the operation can be "clunky" to run and administer so such a model would not work for those with thousands of followers, (he takes the payments himself through PayPal, so authorisations and ensuring the right people have access to the feed can be time consuming).

However, with over 50 people already signed up, even if they're paying by the quarter, Dean is generating a healthy dollar return per year in subscriptions. This is certainly nothing to be sniffed at, given the reasons behind DAPremium being set up; (to quote Dean from his blog) "Twitter is like tax - as an analyst, you have to grit your teeth and do it, painful, time-consuming and distasteful as it is. I end up spending time on Twitter that could be more profitably spent writing posts on this blog, advising clients or taking briefings. It adds cost, but brings little in the way of value or revenue".

So what next for the feed? Dean says he'd like to turn it into a community, although is mindful of the time that might take to manage, but he's hopeful of it becoming more a forum than 'newsletter-esque' platform.

I think it's a great way of protecting - and monetising - his IP as an analyst, and is already proving successful. Despite a few people speculating on the idea for a couple of years, no-one other than Dean, from what I can see, has put it into practice, and it's good to see it a success.

Others may want to sit up and take notice - this could catch on.

Chris Owen / @wonky_donky