Dear Biz,
I’m sure you appreciate the intense, burning interest that people have in how Twitter is going to make money. After all, you’ve got more than 50 million users, which has caused the monetization buzz to get more increasingly feverish the more popular that Twitter becomes.
But can you do me a favour: please stop talking about how Twitter is going to be announcing a business model soon. It’s an act that, frankly, has grown tired because it keeps repeating itself.
Yes, I understand that you’ve got to answer the “money” question every time you do an interview but the thing is you keep giving interviews so they keep asking the money question. It’s a vicious circle that’s become more vicious.
That said, it seems that you have a hard time...
Big news from Twitter: it has officially launched its “Firehose” API in which third-parties can have 100% access to Twitter’s data. Twitter proclaims the announcement as something “Enabling a Rush of Innovation” but you could easily argue it is “Enabling a Rush of Revenue” as Twitter will start to charge for different API packages.
Much like the recent announcement that Twitter will start placing advertising within search results, the concept of charging for access to its API is a no-brainer from a business perspective. It’s something that I have argued in the past that Twitter should have been actively considering given the value that the API provides to third-party services looking to use the API to build businesses.
As GigaOm’s Liz...
The blogosphere was abuzz yesterday when it was disclosedt that Twitter is having discussions with Google and Microsoft about giving them access to the firehose of data generated by Twitter users, including links.
There were enthusiastic discussions about whether these potential deals would finally mean Twitter would be able to create a viable business model given Google and Microsoft may be willing to pay millions of dollars for access to the data. My first thought was that Google pays Firefox millions of dollars in referral fees to drive traffic so striking a data deal with Twitter could see the same kind of financial return.
While a deal with Google and/or Microsoft is definitely interesting, a far more intriguing story comes from Silicon Valley Insider, which reports that Twitter is...
TechCrunch (Michael Arrington) has a post looking at Twitter’s “Revenue Dilemma”, looking at how Twitter is still having a hard time trying to figure out how much money it can make offering services such as advertising and analytics.
It’s an issue that continues to attraction attention as the number of people using Twitter has surpassed 50 million, which, in theory, means there’s a large audience that the company can start to monetize.
While the spotlight is on how Twitter is going to make money, there’s an interesting story starting emerge: a growing number of companies using Twitter’s API that are creating businesses that are generating revenue.
This begs the question is what happens if an “economic ecosystem” is established around...
My apologies to regular readers for the scarcity of posts at this blog lately. Being “communities editor” at the Globe is taking up every minute I have and then some. I realize it’s not much, but here’s a recent post I wrote for the Nieman Journalism Lab
As almost everyone is well aware by now, there’s been a never-ending roll call of doom in the newspaper business for some time — papers closing, companies filing for bankruptcy, massive layoffs and so on. Some have chosen to deal with this by clinging to the old “accentuate the positive” approach, but the most optimistic signs by far have been the journalists who are forging ahead (such as the InDenverTimes, an online startup staffed by laid-off Rocky Mountain News reporters and editors) and...
My friend Kara Swisher at All Things D has some juicy details from a recent all-hands meeting at a theatre near Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. Apparently the shyness that Scoble remarked on when he met Mark Zuckerberg in Davos must have been a temporary thing, because it sounds like Marky Mark was more than happy to chatter about the dollars flowing through Facebook’s bank account.
Apparently the site is expecting to have revenue of about $150-million for last year, which was widely expected. But Mark said Facebook is looking for twice that this year, if not more. And he’s going to need all that revenue, because he also said capital expenditures are going to be about $200-million. For what? Maybe some more telephone operators to handle all the switchboard calls when they...
I know everyone is obsessed with when Mark Zuckerberg is going to announce the winner of the “Dance with Facebook for $10-billion” contest, but I found something he said during his interview with John Battelle interesting. He said:
“We don’t focus on optimizing the revenue we have today. It has always been our philosophy to run the company at around break even as we grow.”
This reminded me of what Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark have always said about craigslist.org, which is that they basically spend zero time thinking about how to “monetize” all the eyeballs and pageviews they get (about eight billion a month or so) and spend close to 100 per cent of their time thinking about their users and what they want and need.
That drives Wall Street types...
The ease with which Craigslist can boost its revenues truly boggles the mind. According to several estimates, the privately-held classified provider controlled by founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster already has annual revenues of about $150-million — and that’s from charging $25 for job listings in just a handful of cities, and $75 for a listing in San Francisco, as well as $10 for listings by apartment brokers in New York City.
Now Craigslist is adding fees in four more cities — Chicago, Orange County, Sacramento and Portland. So that’s another $25 per listing in all of those centers. And the classified site, which pushes a mind-blowing eight billion web pages or so every month, is already making $150-million or so from seven cities. Even if you assume...
Well, all the nervous hand-wringing about Yahoo’s poor results and what they might mean for Google turns out to be unnecessary. The search behemoth turned in a stellar quarter that thrashed analysts’ estimates fairly soundly, and there was no mention of any weakness in advertising (which Yahoo blamed for its 37-per-cent drop in profits). In fact, Google not only didn’t feel the same pain as Yahoo — it helped dish some out, by continuing to take market share away from Yahoo in ad-related search.
Thanks to Google, people are probably getting used to the idea of a company with almost 10,000 employees and revenue of more than $8-billion doubling its profit and boosting its sales by 70 per cent in a year — even though that is almost unheard of. I think Microsoft...
I guess I have money on the brain (see my previous post about Craigslist as a cash machine). Courtesy of I Want Media, I came across a story from Marketwatch about how Google could wind up with more than one-quarter of all the online ad spending in the United States this year.
According to the story, eMarketer estimates Google will wind up with revenue of $4-billion this year, which would be 25 per cent of the estimated $16-billion online ad market. That would also represent a revenue jump of about 65 per cent. Not bad. Another interesting point in the report is how Google continues to pull away from Yahoo in the online ad race:
In 2005, Yahoo and Google had virtually the same amount of U.S. ad revenues. Yet by the end of 2006, Google is expected to pocket almost twice the amount of...