Twitter Is Quietly Building A Huge Business. Business Insider Intelligence is a new research and analysis service that delivers insight and intelligence about the Internet industry. The product is currently in beta. For more information, and to sign up for a free 30-day trial, click here. Twitter’s U.S. Growth Is Stalling. 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. In November, Twitter.com drew an estimated 24 million unique visitors, down from 25.1 million in October. Unique visitors are still up 24 percent from a year ago, but there has been zero growth since July. Globally, however, Twitter.com attracted an estimated 104.6 million visitors in October (the month with the most recent data), up 79.4 percent from the year before and still growing at a steady clip month-over-month.
These numbers are not the same as total users, which Twitter counts at 175 million (not all users go to Twitter.com, many use desktop or mobile clients, but the comScore numbers are a good proxy for Twitter’s overall health). Bidding War For Twitter Raises Valuation To Nearly $4 Billion. Kleiner Perkins Currently In Pole Position. 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. The bidding has gotten more intense from what we’re hearing. Russian firm DST, among others, submitted offers to invest valuing the company above $3 billion, say multiple sources. But the current leader, and likely winner, is Kleiner Perkins, say multiple sources. And the likely valuation when the smoke clears will be close to $4 billion. Alpha investor and Kleiner investor John Doerr is personally leading the charge, we’ve heard, and is acting something like a dog with a bone that won’t let go. Is the deal done? This fits in neatly with Kleiner’s push to invest in the “third wave” of technology disruption. 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. Is this price going to cut too many small innovators out of the market? See social data developer Pete Warden’s in-depth analysis of today’s Twitter news earlier today on ReadWriteWeb. If Twitter Raises Another Round, It Won't Be Because It's Figured Out How To Make Money. DST May Make Huge Twitter Investment. Why Twitter's New CEO Will be Good for Everyone.
World-changer Evan Williams has stepped down as the CEO of micromessaging social network Twitter, the company announced today, and will pass that role to serial entrepreneur and company COO Dick Costolo. (Above, photo by Joi Ito) Williams seems to spawn revolutionary publishing platforms with the wave of a hand: Blogger.com, Twitter and, though it didn’t work out as well, the podcasting platform Odeo. Costolo is best known to date for his work at Feedburner, the RSS publishing and analytics service bought and squandered by Google.
RSS has been widely derided as too hard for consumers and relegated to obscurity “under the hood” – replaced even in the lives of many tech-watchers by Twitter. Costolo is uniquely fortunate to get to steer both of those ships in his career. If his past performance is any indication, his promotion should be very good for Twitter. Before There Was Twitter Feedburner was a fascinating service, which still continues operating today. Turning Tweets Into Cash.
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: Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Twitter Product Evolutions.