Despite boasting its 5-billionth tweet recently, Twitter’s not “looking in the couch cushions for a revenue model,” according to CEO Evan Williams.
Williams, speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, said that the micro-blogging company is much more focused on continuing to add improvements and value to the service.
Especially when it comes to the commercial segment, all that value will eventually pay off, Williams said – he’s not losing sleep. “If we’re driving a lot of value for businesses, I’m not too worried about extracting some of that value for ourselves,” he noted.
Twitter, despite being monetization-challenged, managed to attract $100 million in venture capital funding recently, placing its valuation at $1 billion. The investor confidence is a testament to the evolution it has undertaken since a year ago when Twitter was still a relatively unknown Web company that simply provided a way for people to write 140-character updates (seen by those that have signed up to follow the member as well as in an ongoing site-wide “news feed”). It has undergone a transformation from a way for narcissistic Web denizens to tell the world pointless minutia like what they had for breakfast, to a searchable database for what people are talking about, in real time. It’s a clever way to gauge the zeitgeist, and has implemented “trending topics” to alert visitors – members and non-members – to what’s being tweeted about the most. The trends can be broken down by geography as well.
Taken in all, it’s information that becomes worthwhile when you have millions of tweets ongoing around the world. That’s part of the reason Google and Bing have been in talks (separately) with Twitter to integrate tweets into search engine results.
Twitter also received kudos for its role in broadcasting what was happening with the Iranian election, as hundreds of Iranians turned to tweeting as one of the only safe, non-trackable methods of public dissent.
Twitter has flirted with various ways to make money from its traffic, including advertising, which doesn’t work well with its “news feed” layout or the tweet notification mechanisms via Facebook and mobile. Williams said the service is still considering ways to leverage advertising and its vast quantity of data. It also has tried to bolster a market for paid, premium business services; many businesses use Twitter to promote their products or run marketing campaigns.
Though Twitter growth has tapered off a bit lately, it’s seen a four-fold increase in tweets since November of 2008. It counted 20.9 million users as of September, up about 18-fold from a year earlier, according to ComScore Inc.
