
What is Twitter's source of income?? - ivan

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danielha
The same magical place most web startups get their income from.

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zemaj
Unicorn tails.

As a serious answer; Lots of web-based revenue sources are volume based. The
more they grow the more they can make. In advertising this is somewhat
exponential - the more popular your service, the larger CPM (cost per thousand
page views) advertisers are willing to pay (all other things being equal & to
a point).

As such, if you don't need a revenue source when you start, it makes sense to
build your business first and add revenue later. You could make more in your
first month of revenue than all other previous months combined. Twitter could
easily add some combination of advertising, premium accounts or premium
customisations at any point.

However, whether that's good in practice or not is another matter...

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nickb
Currently, they have none. They have lots of expenses though. One of the
biggest is the SMS fees... they pay for receiving and sending them. I heard an
interview with Evan in which he said that the fees are in 5 figures per month!

How would they make money in the long run? Sell pro tools and statistics...
similar to the way Feedburner makes money. Just study Feedburner and you'll
see plenty of parallels.

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acgourley
If you generate enough SMS messages through an official SMS portal, they begin
to start paying YOU by the message, because they are making so much in SMS
charges.

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nickb
What's the source of your statement? I've talked to few cell companies and
they never offered anything even remotely as attractive. Best we could do is
get a discount. You're talking about revenue sharing. I've never seen anyone
extract that out of them.

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tienshiao
TV shows do it all the time. You don't think they encourage people to vote
multiple times just for the hell of it, do you?

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BrandonM
Perhaps all the spinning images of browsers that take several seconds to load
Twitter generate energy which is then sold.

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gustaf
<http://evhead.com/2006/10/birth-of-obvious-corp_25.asp>

Until today it's funded by Evan Williams who bought Twitter and Odeo from it's
previous investor last year.

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sabat
Actually, dude managed to sell Odeo for a good chunk of money! Kind of
impressive; I didn't hold out much hope for him.

~~~
menloparkbum
He sold odeo for $1M after buying it back from his investors for $5M.

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staunch
You have to hand it to him for being so honorable. I think he knew there
wasn't a good chance he'd make that money back, but he didn't want to screw
his investors. Evan Williams is a model entrepreneur.

~~~
staunch
From what I gather it seems like he wanted out of the project. At some point
it seems he decided "I'm not really a podcast guy, I'm a Twitter guy" [not a
quote]. He did what I think was a pretty honorable thing and took the hit
himself. He could have easily shared the loss with his investors. I would of
course agree it was risk they signed up for, but he chose differently.

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fdafdasfdsa
The more important question is, What in the Jumping Jack Flash _IS_ Twitter. I
have been to the site twice, heard people ooh and aah over it, and for the
life of me I have no idea what it is. Dot com bubble anybody?

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orlick
My guess: They will start selling professional accounts

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cmars232
They're hoping to be bought out?

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superhelix
birdseed?

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yaacovtp
VC

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sabat
PG talks a lot about this kind of thing in his essays (and book). (Zemaj's
answer is pretty good, too.)

There are two models I can imagine for Twitter: 1) working in advertising, or
2) become a feature of some larger business.

You might also speculate that there would be some permutation of Twitter that
would be interesting enough to become Twitter Pro or somesuch. But those kind
of things are not often very exciting.

