Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has insisted that he isn’t contemplating an initial public offering (IPO) at the moment, adding that both the company’s investors and regulators have put him under no pressure to launch one.
The remarks were reported by Julia Boorstin from CNBC, following a video interview in which he answered multiple questions on advertising, data protection and Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg’s IPO for Facebook has been pretty rocky to say the least, but Costolo is said to have emphasised that the experiences of one of Twitter’s greatest rivals is completely irrelevant.
“Nothing external to the company has had any bearing on how I think about when to take Twitter public or not to,” Costolo said, according to Boorstin. It looks like Twitter has no plans to go public then. Furthermore, Twitter also has no plans, at least not willingly, to sell the company either.
During a Q&A session led by CNBC’s Twitter followers, Costolo said: “We have every hope and belief that we will be a successful, independent company.”
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The interview also touched upon some other pretty interesting topics, including the company’s challenges to increase revenue and advertising possibilities.
“Our biggest advertising challenge is making sure our revenue reflects the percentage of users that exist, and use Twitter in various countries.
We’ve got users all over the world, the userbase is growing globally quite fast and we need to expand our advertising platform globally beyond just the couple of countries inbound.”
During the CNBC interview the Twitter CEO also emphasised that the company wasn’t selling data, but that it had plans to develop its analytical tools around “what kinds of interests [user’s] followers have.”
He also revealed that at the moment, 40 percent of Twitter’s registered users don’t actively tweet, instead choosing to login and simply consume information from other people. Confidently Costolo said that he also expected that number to rise in the future.
Twitter has made some pretty bold moves recently, the most significant being the heavy restrictions to its data and application programming interface for developers. It’s clearly trying to reign users back into the core product, and away forom third-party clients or applications which it feels is inferior.
Where and how the firm is making money though is unclear. Promoted tweets and trends only go so far, and the questions from Boorstin seem to point towards a much deeper underlying issue. If Twitter doesn’t sell or go public, how will it continue to afford its own growth and popularity?
From these responses on CNBC at least, Costolo seems pretty confident that the social media giant will continue to thrive many years from now. Provided it’s still around then and offering a service we continue to adore, who are we to judge what he does with the company behind the scenes?
Image Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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