

Twitter: A fine 'pre-business' but un-monetizable and a deadly acquisition target - jackowayed
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=14568

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BRadmin
"AOL: Acquired by Time Warner for $120 billion"

I'm pretty sure it was AOL doing the acquiring of Time Warner. I remember
hearing this from an AOL exec, thinking it was absurd, and then looking it up
online only to find out she was right.

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swombat
_The ones that do make money all seem to involve either mailing stuff to
people who have paid for it online or getting advertising deals from the likes
of General Motors._

What kind of web analyst misses out on the slew of other online monetisation
strategies and dares make such a ridiculous statement?

I find the whole argument dubious. I'm pretty sure that there are many
potential monetisation strategies for Twitter, most of which the analyst
couldn't think of, apparently. I don't really want it to be bought, but I
don't think it would be a bad purchase for, say, Google.

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tptacek
Your argument, which might be strong, would be evidently strong if you could
cite a couple cases where a large "pre-monitized" turned out to be lucrative
for an acquirer.

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dangoldin
I can think of Summize which became Twitter search.

It doesn't necessarily make Twitter any more money but I do think they're
getting a lot more growth because of it.

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tptacek
How much do you think Summize went for? 500k? $1MM at the outside? Is that
really the best counterexample we've got?

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wallflower
I remember Summize was rumored to have gone for $15m in cash and Twitter
stock.

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tptacek
The entire round of funding Twitter took just prior to buying Summize was
$15MM.

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garply
Whenever I see a webapp that's popular and has no ads, I can't help but wonder
why. Sure, maybe they have a non-ad-based business model further down the
pipeline, but what do they lose by putting up some ads? I doubt that they
would lose many users, and it would slow their burn rate, at least.

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dsil
In nearly all cases you won't make enough money to increase your burn rate at
all.

When you're focusing on growing your user base, its not worth it to lose a few
users and generally make your site a little less usable and appealing for
$100ish dollars a month.

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garply
Really? The notion that this many (<http://www.statsaholic.com/twitter.com>)
eyeballs a day (with a lot of those people being early adopters) is worth $100
/ month strikes me as completely incredulous. I personally would pay well over
$100 a month to buy ads on their site.

~~~
dsil
Oh no no, I meant most sites...twitter could be making thousands of dollars a
month, probably tens of thousands. But they're going for acquisition/valuation
of hundreds of millions of dollars. Ads would slow their growth, if only a
bit, but even a few hundred thousand in ad revenue at this point isn't worth
that, in my opinion, and apparently theirs as well.

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asadkn
On one hand, people despise services that start out free and turn to be
completely paid, but on the other hand, they appreciate services that start
our free and later introduce some paid services WHILE still continuing to
offer the existing services for free.

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ig1
Those figures for companies given as examples seem off.

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tptacek
Why?

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BRadmin
No mention of Calacanis and the recommended list?

