NEWS

Twitter will generate case with business tools, services

eWeek
May 19, 2009
By Nicholas Kalakowski

Twitter will not rely on advertising dollars to fuel its future growth, according to company co-founder Biz Stone, who suggested that tools and businesses services would provide the necessary revenue. Twitter has experienced explosive growth in the three years since its initial rollout, with some 9.3 million users by March 2009.

Twitter, the micro-blogging site that lets its community post about their lives in 140-character "tweets," will earn revenue through tools and services as opposed to advertising dollars, according to a May 19 Reuters report.

"There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising," Stone said, according to the Reuters report. The size of Twitter’s staff, he added, would double by the end of 2009.  

According to research firm ComScore, Twitter grew 131 percent in March 2009, to some 9.3 million site visitors, up from 4.3 million in February. Its growth attracted rampant speculation that a major player such as Google would step in to purchase the three-year-old site. In 2008, Facebook reportedly made a $500 million offer, but was turned down.

"We were joking in the office that if this growth rate continues week over week, we'll run out of people on planet Earth to sign up to Twitter by the end of the year," Stone joked, according to Reuters.

In response to the buzz, Stone blogged in April 2009 that the company was in discussions "on a variety of subjects" with unnamed companies, but that the short-term goal would nonetheless continue to remain an "independent company."

The enterprise has cautiously embraced Twitter, with Salesforce.com adding the site to its Service Cloud. A Microsoft-sponsored site, ExecTweets, was previously seen as one of the primary ways through which Twitter would generate revenue. The company also announced plans to offer commercial accounts at some point in 2009.