Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Twitter's Revenue Model

It's still hard for me to believe that a company as ubiquitous as Twitter does not have a revenue model yet. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the founders of Twitter discuss their plans to generate revenue in the near future. Click here for a link to the video.

2 comments:

Joe Pelletier said...

Many of Twitter's VC backers have shared the same philosophy as the company's founders: let the user base determine the best uses for Twitter by encouraging the development of apps and see how these derivatives of the service could potentially lead to systematic revenue. Very interesting approach -- I have a short entry on Twitter's growth and strategy in my blog.

A potential partnership with Google and a recent contract with a media production company also seems to suggest that Twitter is looking at a variety of revenue sources.

Joe

Michael Roberto said...

Thanks, Joe, for your comments. Twitter is clearly a business that benefits from network effects. Therefore, trying to encourage the development of a broad user base with many apps is a good idea in the early stages. Of course, Facebook followed that strategy as well. In Facebook's case, however, they seem to be having some difficulty turning customers into revenue streams. It will be interesting to see how Twitter fares.