The Next Web

Twitter in 2010: Acquisitions and Revenue says Biz Stone.

Biz Stone
Image by jdlasica via Flickr

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has been on quite a press tour of late, giving us bloggers and journos plenty to talk about.

In his latest stop off, Tel-Aviv, the entrepreneur has confirmed more acquisitions are in the pipeline for 2010.

“That is something we are definitely interested in…We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision.”

“As our attention is grabbed by some of these developers, we will take a hard look at them,” Stone said.

Twitter’s only acquisition as yet was Summize in 2008, now simply known as Twitter Search.

Stone also addressed Twitter’s ambitions to make 2010 a drive towards profitability, potentially through “non-traditional advertising”, something we’ve delved into here.

“2010 is really going to be the revenue year,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re going to be profitable, but we have plenty of time”

“We are making some money today, but it’s just the beginning,” Stone said.

Current revenue comes from companies paying to use Twitter’s data, these include partnerships with Google and Microsoft.

On Monday, Stone said he definitely doesn’t want to sell the company but may pursue an initial public offering or an alternative.”The point is, we want to build our own company that will last for a long time. If an IPO’s the way to do that, then sure. We don’t have it checked off on the calendar yet.”

 

  • Barney
    What can twitter really acquire?

    If they buy ONE photo sharing app - they kill the rest..

    same applies for any kind of app really.

    They can not do this or they will just pwn themselves like Facebook do all the time.

    Twitter is certainly NOT a long term solution to realtime though, so I'm not too worried what happens. It is only temporary, in a few years we will be sick of blue birds
  • I think Twitter is a victim of its own success. They have a good service, but the down side it that almost half of the traffic and access to the service is through mobile devices. This is going to make it almost impossible to have a one-size-fits-all advertising that runs seamlessly regardless of device.

    Again, it would drive people away if they're asked to start paying for something they've always used for free. The only way I see they can generate some revenue would be from companies - by providing them statistical data.

    Other than that, I'm not sure how they intent to monetize their site.
  • Barry Welch
    I believe that will be the focus of the acquisitions in 2010, namely to acquire 3rd party tools that are experiencing major growth. At that point, they can integrate the meta info (aka SuperTweets) and generate revenue. Of course, they can't acquire everyone.
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