>Most of those logins happen over my phone, meaning I don't see the "trending" ads...or any ads at all. That's the actual problem with Twitter regarding moneti

>Most of those logins happen over my phone, meaning I don't see the "trending" ads...or any ads at all. That's the actual problem with Twitter regarding monetization, not the function of the site. Twitter is more a service/platform than a website, and thus Twitter consumption is decentralized. Therefore they're not able to capitalize on their broad reach through ad publishing. It's just as well, since Twitter has shown a staunch unwillingness to place traditional web ads on their site. If they did have a FB/Google style ad setup, one apparent next step would be to charge for API services, to make up for lost revenue from people not using the official site. Third party developers would be forced to pass on the cost to consumers, most likely through hosting their own advertising. Since Twitter doesn't seem to want to do that, this leaves customer data as their major capitalizable asset. Therefore the question is how capitalizable all the data flowing to Twitter is.