Comments on: Everyone Is Insane, Twitter Has No Revenue

By: Twitter To Bring In $4 Million In Revenue This Year

Twitter To Bring In $4 Million In Revenue This Year — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:24:03 +0000

[...] revenue is paltry when stacked against the $100 million they recently raised. This corroborates my previous statements that Twitter’s VC valuation, and the numbers thought up by technologists were far out of the [...]

By: Steve Dodd

Steve Dodd — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:28:02 +0000

Hi Alex, I understand your perspective but don’t at all agree. I think your missing the bigger picture regarding what’s being developed to leveage Twitter that goes way beyond people. Twitter is not Facebook and it’s not Google. The harder those companies try to emulate Twitter functionality, the more value Twitter gains because they are all missing one fundamental point. Twitter is the only ubiquitos transactional monitoring system. Currently, it’s monitoring people’s thoughts and activities. It’s likely (think IBM’s tweeting house) that future users will include TV Remote controls (impact on audience measurement) and many other electronic devices. In my opinion, the value is in what everyone else is doing with it.

By: Gunther Sonnenfeld

Gunther Sonnenfeld — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:41:01 +0000

Hi Alex…

Very interesting perspective, and I agree with a lot of what you are saying. However, I think the biggest problem VC and other investors face with Twitter is not so much its business model, but its development model. Truth is, there is no viable way to place an accurate valuation on the platform simply because the founders chose to enlist the development community at large to vet out its scalability, and ultimately, its business model.

People are indeed crazy if they think that Biz Stone and crew don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Perhaps you’re not even suggesting this in your post, but I happen to believe that through 3rd parties and other strategic partners, these guys are sitting on multiple – and passive – revenue streams that will likely send them well north of even a $2B valuation over the next 18 months.

I also don’t understand why so many folks are looking for an ad monetization model from Twitter – it’s not an ad medium, it’s a conversation engine that will derive profit from content generation and linking (which may include 3rd party ads). The same could be said for the Facebook / FriendFeed marriage, although in that case, I think their greater value will evolve in the form of content aggregation and real-time search.

Then again, I could be way wrong, and I’ll just have to retreat to my tweets
amid the chaos of Twitter attrition.

Best,

Gunther Sonnenfeld
@goonth

By: Richard Cunningham

Richard Cunningham — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:00:28 +0000

Just because the general public don’t know what the business model is, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Twitter must be bombarded with requests for business development, most of which will involve other companies giving Twitter money for something.

I could see brands wanting to add more to their Twitter pages such as more links, products, analytics’s etc.

Also real-time search is going to be big, I wonder how much Google would pay to get access to the firehose and index that.

I think it’s in Twitter’s best interest that people don’t know what the business model is so as not to put off users and to dissuade well funded competition from starting.

I think Twitter is worth more per user than Facebook because the content is mostly public and of high quality where as Facebook’s is private and mostly of no interest to people other than friends of the poster. The question is what number of users will they reach?