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Wow, he may end up in the dictionary next to the word 'capitalist'. I love that he has positive cash flow. I know websites and Internets are all the rage but he
by jeromec 17y ago
Wow, he may end up in the dictionary next to the word 'capitalist'. I love that he has positive cash flow. I know websites and Internets are all the rage but he may be actually making more profit than Facebook, and certainly more than Twitter.
- clistctrl 17y agoTwitter may not be making anything right now, but when they decide to start monetizing it, they have the potential to rake in huge profits.
- jeromec 17y ago"...when they decide to start monetizing it" You say that like it's as simple as making the decision. Why would they hold off on making money? I think it's because they don't know how to monetize it. I'm curious to see what they come up with.
- dugmartin 17y agoBecause as soon as they start bringing in real money all the hockey stick revenue charts that they present to VCs start having real data points.
- jfarmer 17y agoBecause money often interferes with growth, and in any case if your first priority is growth it's best to focus on that rather than bring in secondary or tertiary concerns.
- jeromec 17y agoAccording to a Mashable article in March '09: "The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month." I'm not sure how much you can interfere with that kind of growth. My point is that people seem to talk easily about monetizing all those users, but nobody seems to be able to give specifics on how to do it.
- abstractbill 17y agoEven if users don't mind the ads, it can take a depressing amount of time to integrate ads into a site [1]. Assuming you don't just use adsense, each advertiser often has their own way of doing things and will have one-off requirements for how their ads should behave on your site. That's engineering time that could be used to fuel growth by developing features and working on scaling. [1] I'm speaking from personal experience. For about six months, I worked on nothing but integrating various advertisers' products into justin.tv. Video ad providers are particularly difficult to work with, since it's still quite a young market.
- jeromec 17y agoAds may be their obvious route, but I wonder how much of a turn-off that will be for users. I'm totally rooting for Twitter to be successful, I just wanted to highlight the contrast between this small $5M business actually making money vs. "hot" web companies that may be faddish, and have yet to prove a model to make money, yet get all the press plus $100M investment.
- jfarmer 17y agoI think it's great that Twitter is focused on only one thing: being the first social network to reach 1Bn users. I mean, honestly, who gives a shit whether Twitter is making money now or not? Twitter doesn't, their users don't, and their investors don't. Who else matters in this equation? The only reason people talk about it is because other people say "Yes, Twitter is big, but how will they make money?" People said the same thing about Google and (some) still say the same thing about Facebook.
- jonknee 17y agoBecause if they don't make money they will go away.
- jeromec 17y agoTwitter probably won't be the first to 1B users, at 45M plus 1 new user/second currently that will probably be linkedin. Also, pumping huge amounts of cash into things that don't actually have the corresponding cash value is how bubbles form and burst. (reply to jfarmer above) EDIT: whoever downvoted me shouldn't have. Regardless of your feelings about Twitter, my statement about economic bubbles is correct.
- shaddi 17y agoPotential to make money is not making money, particularly without any idea of how to turn the former into the latter.