Fast Talk

February 17, 2008

Q: Will Twitter ever make money? | posted by Saabira Chaudhuri

Share your ideas

10 Total

February 17, 2008 at 11:59am

Shyamala Rajaram

Yes it can

February 17, 2008 at 12:11pm

Jimmy Gardner

It seems that everyone but twitter will make $$ using Twitters developed API and platform. Odd isn't it ?

February 17, 2008 at 3:51pm

Sheikh Imran Ahmed

Everything is possible.

February 17, 2008 at 4:08pm

Gary Mead

I think Twitter is not an idea that will last very long. I have never used the service myself. This is just a trend and will fade - in time.

February 17, 2008 at 8:23pm

Chris Heuer

ev and biz will sell the service which will then be integrated as part of a 'bundle' so they will make money, though I dont think the service itself will...

February 17, 2008 at 8:40pm

Andrew Field

Maybe, buit not because it is a good idea. Who really wants a larger number of shallow relationships in their life? Personally, I'd like a smaller number of "friends," and deeper relationships with each of them.

February 17, 2008 at 9:19pm

m e

Revenue - costs = profit
(Overhead fixed costs and variable costs)
"Free" services really arent free and more and more, we will have to learn enough legal terminology to if we as users can tolerate what's being sold.
Ads or location based ads or summary data or outright user info
They will have to earn revenue somehow.
Cost cutting mode usually leads to a down spiral and quality and feature loss.
Perhaps the Twitter part is a loss leader and another independent product or service is sold to get revenue.

February 18, 2008 at 2:26pm

Seth Kravitz

This isn't the business model of a company that was ever meant to make money. This is the web 2.0 business model which is to reach critical mass and hope to get bought by a larger company looking to vertically or horizontally integrate.

Its options as it stands are third party ads, display ads, direct sales (which requires hiring a sales team) or selling ads in a newsletter. Unless it plans on selling millions of twitter tshirts, I doubt you will see any significant revenue.

That leaves you with the final rev option which is email list rental or sales. They obviously have a ton of emails and could generate tens of thousands a month renting their list. Obviously, the backlash would be quite severe when the users caught on.

Oh well, hopefully they get bought, otherwise their infrastructure costs will slowly deplete their VC funding down.

February 18, 2008 at 2:27pm

Lukas Soukup

I think it will - I can image people to pay for being able to follow a day of their favourite movie stars or sportsmen - see what they are doing to compare or just simply get some inspiration...

February 18, 2008 at 3:51pm

alex harris

I don't think it will be tough for Twitter to turn their model into a profitable one.

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