Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Twitter snags over 100 million users, eyes money-making

The popular Internet service hopes to snag hundreds of millions more users in coming years by making the service easier, integrating Twitter directly into Web sites and focusing more on customizing the service for mobile devices.

At the company's first conference for Twitter developers on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams said generating revenue was among the key priorities going forward -- a change of tone for a firm that had previously said it focused mainly on improving the user experience.

The comments come a day after Twitter rolled out a new advertising program dubbed "Promoted Tweets," its first attempt to make money from its service and a milestone on the path toward an initial public offering.

"Money is important," Williams said during a special talk at the event devoted to monetization. "It takes a hell of a lot of money to run Twitter. There has to be a very solid revenue stream underneath this to fuel it."

But co-founder Biz Stone stressed that while the company was not philosophically opposed to floating shares to the public, he stressed that a public offering was not on the radar for the time being.

"At this point we have 175 people and we just yesterday announced our revenue strategy. We're not talking about an IPO, Stone told Reuters at the event, which was attended by about 1,000 people.

While the fledgling advertising program unveiled this week now has just five advertisers in a trial run, Stone said in an interview that the company believed the new ad service represented one of the primary businesses that would finance the company's operations going forward.

"We are pretty confident that this is going to work out to be a profitable, sustainable, real business for us," Stone said in an interview on the sidelines of the event, which saw Black-Eyed Peas front man will.i.am interviewed about his Twitter views.

COMMERCIAL AIMS

Twitter executive Dick Costolo also cited commercial accounts, which Twitter is currently testing with a couple hundred companies, as the second main money-making pillar.

Twitter, which allows users to send short, 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of so-called followers, is one of the Web's most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and LinkedIn. The social networking services are increasingly challenging established Web players, like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, by competing for users time online and for advertising dollars.

For More Read:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63D46P20100415

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