

Ask HN: How will twitter make money? - johnrob

Now that they've raised money on a billion dollar valuation, it's clear that someone thinks twitter will have a serious revenue model.  Who has the best guess as to what that could be?
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johnrob
In all honesty, the only thing I can think of is a big sale to either Yahoo or
MS. Either might want to keep twitter away from google, and there's a good
chance that owning the firehose would produce the best 'real time search'
product.

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byoung2
I agree...on its own twitter doesn't have a rock solid path to profitability,
but coupled with a search giant like Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google they could be
a real powerhouse.

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volodia
Could you explain how?

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byoung2
How they don't have a rock solid path to profitability on their own? Or how
they would be a powerhouse coupled with a search giant?

The answer to the first question is that they don't have an easy way (that I
see) of generating significant revenue from their end users, such as premium
plans because most additional functionality is already offered by add on apps
via the API. I don't see advertising working either, without offending users
(we have enough spam tweets).

The answer to the second question: three words - real time search. Google
indexes the web but it can't crawl pages as fast as people can tweet about
them, and there is a vast amount of data about what people are talking about
that doesn't hit the web, blogs, or news sites as fast as it hits Twitter.
This as what I believe is part of the value of YouTube as well (especially if
Google develops a way to transcribe videos). Adding Twitter to the portfolio
would flesh out Google's ability to index more than just web pages (they've
got our email with Gmail, voicemail with Google Voice, and videos with YouTube
already).

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yan
They will be rich once they discover a way to harness these questions to turn
them into clean energy.

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jasonlbaptiste
??????????????

