Twitter now turns attention to revenue
Edited by Yuzhesoft, Aug. 25, 2010
Yesterday Twitter announced the joining of two sales executives, one of which is Adam Bain from Fox Interactive Media and another is Brent Hill, former head of financial services midwest for Google. Bain’s title shall be president of revenue and he shall directly report to COO Dick Costolo. Well, Hill is responsible for the sales of midwest region and he shall report to Bain along with Amanda Levy who resigned from Yelp and Dan Coughlin from Facebook. These two shall be heads of western and eastern sales respectively.
Founded in March 2006, Twitter went into people’s eyes in July 2006. In such a short period it now has more than 145,000,000 registered users who microblog on Twitter and get to know friends.
In the first stage Twitter focused on attracting more and more users and the improvement of the product. Users can share what they are doing on Twitter with a short line or textual message and they have their own page of profile on which users can update it from time to time. Other people can “follow”one user and even become friends. This makes users feel a little addicted with this free service.
Last year investors like Benchmark and IVP has invested $ 35 million capital into Twitter. Those investors also told the media that Twitter did not spent all the money last year so they does not need additional capital.
Twitter is serious with monetization, otherwise it do not hire so many sales directors one after another, which shows Twitter is eager to build good relationship with advertisers. Why? Although Twitter is polular but it does not make profit for more than three years. It’s time for Twitter to explore its money-making model. After Twitter acquired Summize search engine to strenghen its searching service, Twitter put a new product called Promoted Tweets on its searching results page. Advertiser can pay to let their brand or company name show on the searching results and trending topics.
Whether it is the right time or right method for Twitter to make money based on its former performance, the sales revenue can prove this.