Looks like the microblogging posse is getting $100 million in new funding from an investment consortium that includes mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group, equity company Venture Partners and existing backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
Twitter is now valued at around $1 billion which is 4x its Jan 09 evaluation and it now has 54 million visitors a month, which is a 10x increase on the beginning of the year. Conventional thought justifies the investment in such staggering growth. But hang on…I nearly forgot – what do the revenues look like? Oh, they haven’t figured out a business model yet? Ah well, I’m sure they’ll get there eventually…
ARE WE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS?? This isn’t 1998!!! As much as I love Twitter, professionals and consumers the world over are ‘joining the conversation’ and Twitter STILL hasn’t figured out how to make money (Wikipedia shows projected revenues of $400k and this is their 4th year in business). Just to put this in perspective: LinkedIn – with 43 million registered users, is generating in the region of $75-$100m per year. Last October, one of their VCs projected solid revenue models for the first quarter of this year – that didn’t happen (the closest to a business model we got was a hypothetical e-commerce model in the New York Times in June of this year).
The latest idea is to introduce paid business services which include an “analytics dashboard” to help companies monitor Tweets about their business, or verified corporate Twitter accounts. From a marketing perspective, this makes sense – especially if Twitter can offer integration with CRM and marketing automation systems and make its ‘touches’ part of the marketing scoring process. Still, it’s hardly big leap stuff – clearly Twitter is struggling to find answers, so why not turn to its users? The professional twitterati would be all too willing to share some thoughts on what they would pay for…personally, I struggle to understand why contextual content and advertising services remain unavailable to the marketing community. Twitter has a huge opportunity to generate revenues by facilitating more measurable connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways – let’s hope it figures out how.
