14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-blogging site Twitter has announced some of its plans for generating income. The website has seen huge growth these past few months and is trying to find a way to profit from its popularity. One of the options put forward is the launch of paid business- and professional-oriented tools. Co-founder Biz Stone made the announcement on Monday at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York.
“We’re looking at who’s using Twitter and for what,” he said. “Are there any commercial usages that are making a lot of sense?” Twitter will be charging for the premium services and other add-ons in an effort to make the start-up profitable. The service is already being used by some companies to better coordinate their internal workings, in some cases even replacing e-mail. Its limit of 140 characters is seen as a way of forcing their employees to be more to the point in their messages.
Though the site has seen explosive growth in user base in the past few months, in part due to a series of high-profile celebrities using the service, it is still, like many other social networks and free web services, looking at ways to cash in on its success. The most popular way for companies to make money online, ad revenue, was completely dismissed by Stone as an alternative for the moment. Twitter's co-founder is worried that ads displayed with Twitter messages might annoy their users.
“There are a few reasons why we're not pursuing advertising – one is it's just not quite as interesting to us,” Stone said. At least for the time being Twitter isn't focusing on ads as part of their business model and isn't planning on hiring anyone with expertise in the field. “There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don't have anyone there to make or take those calls,” the executive concluded.