Twitter will become a profitable company in 2009, earning a small margin of profit off of some $25 million in revenue from Google and Microsoft, according to Bloomberg.
Both of the search giants paid top dollar (not that they couldn’t afford it), recently for access to Twitter’s “firehose” of updates, to allow them to incorporate the data into their search results, making them more “real-time.”
This comes at a surprise to most of the technology world, who were not expecting Twitter to earn a profit for some time. Twitter of course recently began experimenting with future revenue-generating technologies inside of its platform.
What remains to be seen, is if the $25 million was biased towards a one time payment, or was merely an installment on a multi-year plan. Given the hoopla created over packaging these tweets into their search engines, it would seem that Twitter could indeed squeeze the payments yearly from Google and Bing, without too much work.
That means, that if they bargain well, Twitter is already profitable on a long term basis, before even having one credit card in its database. And you thought that their valuation was high? I did. Perhaps we were off the mark.
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