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This note is from BI Research, a new tech-industry intelligence service. The service is currently in beta and free. To learn more and sign up, please click here. The conventional wisdom about Twitter is that it may be a very nice product, but it doesn't have much of a business. And up until recently, that was true. And the fact that Twitter has been mostly dodging questions about its business metrics helps perpetuate the idea.
Twitter Is Quietly Building A Huge Business
Twitter Ad Revenues to Near $400 Million by 2013 - eMarketer
Twitter will earn $139.5 million in global ad revenues this year, up 210% from $45 million in 2010, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. By 2013, eMarketer estimates worldwide ad revenues at Twitter will reach nearly $400 million. “Since their debut in April 2010, Twitter’s Promoted Products have proven successful in the US,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “Marketers have shown solid engagement rates with Twitter advertising—in some cases better than those on Facebook—despite Twitter’s relatively smaller audience.” This forecast features a slightly lower 2011 ad revenue estimate than eMarketer’s previous estimate from January 2011—a result of Twitter’s slower-than-expected rollout of several advertising initiatives, including ad sales offices in markets outside the US and a platform enabling advertisers to buy ads on a self-serve basis. In January, eMarketer forecast that Twitter would have $150 million in ad revenue this year.
Twitter’s U.S. Growth Is Stalling
Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More In 2010, Twitter became a truly global phenomenon with 25 billion tweets , some of them quite powerful . But most of its growth came form overseas. If you look at a comScore chart of U.S. visitors to Twitter.com (see above), it looks like Twitter’s growth in the U.S. is stalling.
Bidding War For Twitter Raises Valuation To Nearly $4 Billion. Kleiner Perkins Currently In Pole Position
J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More Two weeks ago we reported that Twitter was mulling over raising a big new round of financing and the expected valuation was in the $3 billion range. Things have developed since then, it seems.
Twitter to Sell 50% of All Tweets for $360k/Year Through Gnip
Twitter announced today a new partnership with social data streaming service Gnip at the Defrag Conference outside of Denver: Gnip will offer 50% of all the messages posted to Twitter for $360,000 per year, or 5% of all messages for $60,000 per year. Pricing is not yet on the Gnip site, but was disclosed in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. Customers will only be allowed to analyze the messages, not display them, and resale of the content itself will remain prohibited. The two companies emphasized that this is the first time a structured, reliable arrangement has been available for the many customers interested in purchasing a large quantity of streaming Tweets. Sale of the 100% full firehose will remain in the hands of Twitter itself. The full firehose contains approximately 1,000 Tweets every second.
If Twitter Raises Another Round, It Won't Be Because It's Figured Out How To Make Money
Twitter is rumored to be looking for one of those DST-style deals where founders, early investors, and early employees sell stock to a holding company and an IPO gets put off a couple years. But according to a source who has looked at Twitter's books, the company, despite a plethora of new ad products – promoted tweets, promoted trends, and promoted users – does not yet have revenues anywhere near scale.
Yes, DST would invest in Twitter if the terms were right The rumor: Twitter is thinking about taking more funding , and Russian holding firm Digital Sky Technologies is the most likely new investor. So is it true? A source close to DST CEO Yuri Milner tells us, "I know he was interested two months ago in Twitter - and he is not interested in many things."
DST May Make Huge Twitter Investment
Why Twitter's New CEO Will be Good for Everyone
"I generally believe that for many technology companies, you need not necessarily have any idea how you will make money when you get started, and if you show good progress on the product and customer adoption, you need not make any commitments to a business model for some time... When asked about Google's lack of a clear business model when he backed the company, John Doerr is said to have responded 'With this kind of traffic, we'll figure it out'. -Dick Costolo, January 2008 Before There Was Twitter
Twitter Marketing Language
Twitter Has 145M Users, Mobile Use Up 62 Percent «
Mobile use of Twitter has climbed by more than 60 percent since April, when the company introduced its official iPhone client, Twitter CEO Ev Williams said in a status update posted to the company’s blog . The Twitter founder also said that the microblogging service has 145 million registered users, up almost 40 percent from the number it had four months ago. Williams said that 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start using the service via a mobile device now, compared with five percent before the first official mobile client arrived in April with the purchase of Tweetie , which was renamed Twitter for iPhone (the company now has official clients for BlackBerry and Android as well). Almost half of all users access the service via a mobile device regularly, Williams says, and the Twitter CEO argues that the decision to develop and/or buy official Twitter clients played a big part in this growth:Twitter and its ecosystem
Twitter Product Evolutions