Twitter is quite the tease. Following what felt like half a decade of disregarding revenue to acquire users, Twitter got serious about making money nearly a year ago with search deals with Google and Bing.
Rumors put those deals at large enough dollar amounts to push the company to break even status in one fell swoop. Then things went south. The @EarlyBird account was shut down, and reports have promoted tweets under performing.
To hell with that says Twitter, revenue is not a problem that we have, we have just been waiting. According to an interview with Ad Age, now CEO Dick Costolo is confident in the ability of Twitter to turn on the revenue tap in a big, big way.
Twitter has two main plans: expand the number of advertisers in their system, and to grow the number of products that they can drop change on. Twitter has worked with more than 40 advertisers so far, and plans to have engaged with more than 100 by the end of the year.
While their current strategy revolves around growing promoted tweets and trends, Twitter also has a known ace up their sleeve that will be played shortly: promoted accounts. Twitter plans to take content that is “organic,” and then promote it for monetary recompense. The company hopes that this different form of advertising will rewrite the script on ad supported companies.
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The question that remains is will Twitter have enough ad spots to ramp up revenue and handle the number of advertisers that the company needs to begin turning a profit? Costolo said that it would be “very easy for us to have enough distribution to [allow companies to] spend as much money with us as [they] want [abbreviated].” Even more, the Twitter CEO said that companies are going to spend “millions” on Twitter.
All in all Twitter is not looking to operate at a loss for much longer; the company has gold in its eyes, and plans to get it.
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