Posted 03/02/2010 - 2:38pm by Julia M
2009 is the year that Twitter broke through to become mainstream. A tremendous wave of growth (58 million worldwide users per month by the end of December) not only made Twitter a household word, but it made the company profitable by the end of the year. Twitter cut deals with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing to make Twitter content searchable. Reportedly, the two deals brought in $25 million...
Until now Twitter has been focused on building its user base. Now the company is turning its attention on how to monetize its high volume of traffic and user loyalty. Besides the search deals, Twitter is looking to other ways to generate revenue, including selling advertising and charging companies for a premium services that would include traffic analytics.
The next phase could be a big one. Twitter is reported to be preparing the rollout of an advertising platform for the service. Appropriately, the rollout is scheduled to take place at the South by Southwest festival in Austin in March. SXSW is where Twitter first made an impact two years ago.
Twitter executives have confirmed that they are working on such a platform. The service recently announced that there are over 50 million tweets every day through the service. This amounts to over 600 per second. With traffic like that, the only surprise about the announcement of an ad platform is that it took this long.
To read the full "Tech Trends" for the week of 3/01/10, click here.
