subject: Just How Will Twitter Make Money? [print this page] Just How Will Twitter Make Money? Just How Will Twitter Make Money?
Although the exact number is not known, it is believed that Twitter has received over $55 million in venture capital funds. However, Twitter's leaked profit (published on Tech Crunch from information from a hacker) was a few million at most. The interesting twist was Twitter was said to have projected over 1.5 billion dollars in revenue by 2013. That's quite a spike in just four years - even with the rapid expansion of the web.
There are a lot of exasperated business people asking "how does Twitter make money?" There is no outright advertising on the website. There are no service fees associated with using the microblogging service. Moreover, no products are sold on the world famous website. So how does the burgeoning tweet service manage to pay for its webservers and lawyers? Or, if they're not doing so yet, how do they plan on putting food on the table in the future?
The answer is information harvesting. Massive, massive information harvesting. If you're reading this article, there's a great chance you already know data collection is huge. And if you didn't already guess, now I'm telling you that Twitter is undergoing one of the greatest data harvesting operations of all time. The proof is in the pudding. The pudding that nobody reads, that is.
Next time you dial up the Twit factory on your computer, stop by the ol' privacy policy and read it for the first time. There in black and white, you will see that Twitter openly and broadly discloses that data collected can be sold to others. The words are friendly, but the truth is cold as steel. Your information is gathered and sold.
This is how Twitter will or already does makes money. And so what? You don't need a black belt in tech and privacy to know that your information is being extracted away to private companies every time you get on the Internet. Twitter is just trying to make billions like any other tech giant. The only difference is they didn't put up any openly visible ways of producing an income so it fuels discussion of their profitability even more.
The funny thing about Twitter is how simple and obvious the service really is. It's just a very basic and limited blog for anyone to use for free. They didn't come up with anything new, they just made a simple service for the average joe to feel "tech" for joining up and making a few easy tweets.
