Twitter: “We don't have a business model ?! Haha (3 times) ... "

"... We have them!" - confidently declares a competent citizen.
Investors know better ...


')
The successful journalist Scott (link to his post), whose name is not important to us, managed to talk heart to heart with one of the co-owners of the Spark Capital fund (Boston) - the name is a man Todd Dagres .

Todd with his foundation is known, in particular, for being on time at the right place and giving Twitter money (along with the same quick-witted guys from New York, from another foundation - Union Square Ventures) in the first run for bills (investment round) .
In total, $ 20 million was transmitted in awe.

So, going back to Todd's interview, we remember that he didn’t just pass by. Todd actually interesting little blurted out, for an experienced man. But the remark about the business model still let go and was courteous:

“We already giggle at ourselves when we hear the chatter about Twitter’s absence of a business model ... We know how we are going to do this, and we are absolutely sure about how we are going to do it. But right now, this is not at all in our interests - telling right and left how we are going to do IT ... We have a business model that still needs to be implemented ... But, of course, I cannot guarantee that it will work ...
One day you will all notice a change on Twitter. They will not worsen, of course, virality and usability - but all of you will immediately understand how we will cut the loot on our Twitter ... "

Then Todd thought and added: “We are not in a hurry, but this is our plan for 2009 , because it's something to pull ...”

The conversation took place on February 25, and on February 27, Evan Williams himself (the founder of Twitter) was already giving an interview on TV Charlie Rose (one of the most famous interviewers in the United States, such as Larry King, who asked Putin - where is the boat? - and Putin said - she drowned).

So, Evan himself did not say anything sensible about monetization. Namely:

"I do not know yet. We have a few ideas. They should, like the service itself, evolve over time. We're going to try a couple of features and see how they work. I think it is not a question - can we generate enough dough for survival (such as we can). <...> The question is whether we can only supersede for survival or start hacking like men (like Google). <...> In general, it seems to us that we have a lot of opportunities for namonetization.
For example, we can start demanding money from users (we could charge users at some point), or take money for some thread additional bows, or we can begin to give some kind of thread advertising - so far we have not been given at all. But here we need to be somehow intelligent, so that the users like it, and the fat sponsors were happy - like Google needs to come up with something "

Then they chatted a bit more about the fact that social services are extremely difficult to monetize, and the search is not difficult. But Evan believes that Twitter is something in the middle between Google and Facebook.
I mean Twitter is less social than Facebook, but more social than Google.
The explanation is “when I am on Twitter, I get tweets from my dad on the one hand, and on the other, I can search for other people (except dad, obviously) speak about the latest iPhone model ...” I want to say - hmmm ... what and doing ...

(no, I still give an exact quotation so as not to become a victim of attacks for slander:
"Twitter is somewhere in between, because of the fact
that I get my dad`s tweets, but I also get
find out what people are saying about the latest iPhone. ")

I recall as an epilogue that Twitter recently received another $ 35 million from a group of empathetic men in the second run.
It is also known that Facebook had a serious conversation with Twitter last fall on the subject of buying the entire shop for between $ 300 and $ 500 million in Facebook shares.
But Twitter was greedy and whimpering that the FB shares did not have an IPO at all and they valued them at $ 2-4 billion (while the FB itself was absolutely convinced that it cost $ 8-9 billion).
Then Twitter offered to estimate the number of shares that the FB would have to fill with them - based on the results of the IPO, which the FB will still arrange for all the participants in the concession headed by Zuckerberg will have wanted money for a long time.
What the FB was blowing his nose into the grass, and the negotiations didn’t work anymore ...

Well, we will follow the development of not dull events ...

Update. I completely forgot why I wrote all this. And in order to ask chastely: and you, startups and ordinary people, see how Twitter can make a lot of money (except for those platitudes that are higher)? imagine you are Evan

Update 2. Damn it, forgot to add the important conditions of the problem: about 750 thousand per day; more than 2000 different web services and programs through which users send tweets; about 6 million registered users.