

Twitter finally in the money with Google link - mun411
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article6953912.ece

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raghus
Four score and seven eons ago, Yahoo! paid Google to power their search
results and we know how that played out.

And now Google is paying Twitter to power their real-time search results? If I
were Biz Stone, I'd be cheerful too.

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axod
"deals worth... several million dollars a MONTH to Twitter"

Does that sound ridiculously high to anyone else? What is the likely ROI to
google/ms on that? Maybe they don't really care :/

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ntoshev
The Twitter deal is supposed to improve search results. Ignoring the
competition, they could calculate if people search more because of the
presence of real-time results, and how much ad revenue do these searches
generate. Given their $2 billion/month revenues, a 0.1% increase on that is $2
million/month.

Taking competition into account, neither Google nor Bing can afford not to
show real time search results given that their competition does. If real time
turns out to be important for users, they can prefer one or another search
engine based on its presence. Also it gives the search engines exposure to
such data so that they can learn how to use it.

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axod
I seriously do not want anything like that in my search results. It'd be full
of spam instantly.

I disagree. I use google because it's clean and quick. Feature creep is a sure
fire way to die if you get it wrong. Sure, they should have a dedicated 'real
time' search thing, like they have for blogs/news etc.

If Google do get dragged down by Bing into tit for tat features etc, it'd be a
great time for a search engine startup to do what Google did at the start.

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waterlesscloud
You're assuming the only value Google gets is the raw data.

Does Google seem like the sort of company that stops with raw data?

Or do they seem like a company that will squeeze every tiny little bit of
information out of that raw data?

There's MUCH more value in Twitter's firehose than the literal tweets.

Google will extract it.

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axod
Can you give some examples. How does anyone know 'stephenfry' is the real
Stephen Fry, and an 'authority', and not a spammer.

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earle
With as much VC they've raised, they certainly better figure out a better way
of monetizing their traffic. $140M by 2014, which would be something like ten
years in business, with $70M in VC?

This is hardly exceptional.

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seldo
Until we know what their margins are, saying that $140m/year in revenue is
unexceptional seems a hard statement to justify. With just 60 employees at,
say, $100k/yr each, their staffing overheads are $6m. That leaves a lot of
headroom for huge hardware and operational costs with a hefty profit margin --
GOOG's is 20%, so they could be spending $100m/year on hardware and still beat
that.

I'm no financial expert, but it seems like that would be a pretty great
business.

Of course, I've no idea where $140M/year is coming from. "A few million per
month" x {Google,Bing} => $4M/month => $48m/year, which is probably still nice
and profitable.

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dominiek
If I was Twitter, I would keep deals like this on the down low. As soon as
your company starts generating revenue, all investors and stakeholders will
start looking at that first revenue stream.

This deal is just a little utility fee they're getting for providing priority
access to their data pipe. At this point, Google and Microsoft will probably
be the biggest 'data pipe' clients that Twitter can have. These deals have
resulted in "several million dollars a month" which is absolutely nothing!
These numbers, without factoring in anything else can never justify Twitter's
current valuation.

That's why I think Twitter should make sure that people don't get distracted
with this puny little revenue stream, but rather turn their heads to the real
pot of gold: monetizing the activity ecosystem.

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zandorg
People say they'd rather Bing won - but Microsoft isn't innovating at the pace
of Google, so I know where I'd rather my custom (including buying adverts)
would go - Google.

