DISQUS

Ryan · 2 months ago

wow, hopefully they can use the cash to fix all the bugs, get rid of the porn bots and make the RT function work like it does now

stukes · 2 months ago

thats crazy. freaking crazy.

Name · 2 months ago

I agree - hype does a lot for a company

illustratorblog · 2 months ago

so, that mean we are going to have better features on Twitter

Joe Ketterling · 2 months ago

$100 million dollars to put a retweet button in...

lindabateman · 2 months ago

I wish I could raise that kind of capital without generating income... From this point on, I want to be held to the standards of big business!

(the pic of the cash is missing the Geico eye balls)

Nicoleta · 2 months ago

It's a bit like facebook very early days: Lot's of invest, little profit. XD

Steve Anness · 2 months ago

What is interesting to me is how Twitter is making money for those who are investing in it. It isn't with page hits or ads on every page but with actual social interaction that is selling products and services and earning money for those who have investing.

maslowbeer · 2 months ago

Of course we don't know specific terms of the deal, i.e., whether the series of shares are participating preferred, liquidation preference, voting rights, whether there are warrant kickers in the mix, etc. There are other ways of normalizing valuation aside from the basic pre+investment=post formula.

Mohamed El-Sayed · 2 months ago

That's really crazy!
I really think Twitter is a waste of time. This hype will eventually end.

Andrew Krebs-Smith · 2 months ago

that's what all the non-users say. but that isn't who determines it's success. It's the users that hold the power to make it succeed or not, and twitter users are pretty die-hard.

merunetworks · 2 months ago

The potential is ridiculous and there is too much money on the sidelines, plain and simple. Its gotta go somewhere (if you know anything about the VC biz) so if it smells like a plan and its growing this fast, why not roll the dice (as an investor)?

Shawn Farner · 2 months ago

More time to find that elusive revenue model.

sull · 2 months ago

most of this cash goes into infrastructure and re-inventing twitter to evolve as another facebook (where facebook has tried to evolve as another twitter). at some point, the two services are going to look very similar.

hindlist · 2 months ago

Twitter you really tweets.

Indra Kumaran · 2 months ago

It appears that history repeats itself...even recent history.

Nadia · 2 months ago

That's great that Twitter is getting more money. But at some point they are gong to need to figure out how to monetize so they can pay their many investors back. I am interested to see how they handle this over time. Twitter is a great free service and I would hate to see it become subscription based or even see them implement some sort of advertising model. Anybody have some good ideas on how they can monetize without forcing the end user to fork up? Facebook is doing really well with their ad platform... but there is just so much more information on users to help integrate targeted advertising for their ad model.

Andrew Krebs-Smith · 2 months ago

advertising. it's the only way.

Nadia · 2 months ago

really? I think they can be more creative than that! I mean it's an option... no doubt!

Alberto Saavedra · 2 months ago

I think that the market opportunity where Twitter is the leader - the realtime interactive web - is a lot bigger than the $1 billion valuation so I don't think is ridiculous. In fact, if investors had more confidence in Twitter's execution ability, the valuation will be higher.

Twitter is a realtime platform and the next waves of innovation in this market are geo-location and e/m-commerce. The key factor to justify the numbers will be their ability to introduce these features to their users (especially developers)

Jason Tryfon · 2 months ago

HOW? no revenue, no EBITDA.
Only in the valley.

Elad Kehat · 2 months ago

Twitter is fast becoming the de-facto real-time messaging bus. Everyone, including Facebook, MySpace, AOL and Yahoo are letting their users sync their status updates with Twitter.
There's a lot of value right there and the right business model will come soon enough. They're right not to go right away with advertising. Much more can be done when you know what the world thinks right now.

bemcapaz · 2 months ago

If you and 5 of your best friends held togheter U$ 1 billion. You guys saw what facebook became (and its generating profit now) why dont spend 10% of the money on twitter? The worst that can happen? Nothing, u guys still have U$900.000 left...

slashed · 2 months ago

This is absolutely ridiculous..
Interactive web, huh? Look at the Google Wave(soon to be unveiled to public) - now that's Interactive! Anyway, we have had jabber for ages! IMO, Twitter is just a very big hype. Quite exciting though))

belmont · 2 months ago

Everyone who thought twitter was fluke is reconsidering now

barringtonarch · 2 months ago

they better start making some money soon then.

quottro · 2 months ago

Well, unless twitter starts doing adspace selling like facebook or alike... I don't think it'll make that kinda money...

"Julianstark" · 2 months ago

Twitter doesn't seem as valuable as Facebook to me. I spend an equal amount of time on both (which is too much xD ), but Facebook is much more valuable as a social networking tool.

Twitter's not bad either, but I only see it's appeal in getting your name out there and/or seeing what's up in the world. It's not the best site for "social networking", per se.

But I do see where Twitter is becoming very valuable...

Also, isn't it funny how you never see anything about MySpace anymore? :)

Nishith Srivastava · 2 months ago

I guess Twitter has already started conceptualizing for a revenue based business model to sustain and channelize all these huge investments and funding it has. I would like to draw an analogy on Google’s growth in the recent times. Be it Google’s business model, industry buy-ins, favorable developments and later on the migration of its services from a free-for-all to a money making machine. Google started off as an innovative concept and introduced its marvelous search engine, on similar lines Twitter introduced an innovative service that gave the birth of the new buzzword Web 2.0. Google had an instant hit in its kitty with its search engine and suddenly VCs, companies and investors were knocking on Google’s door. Twitter’s story is very similar as well. Twitter has already received funding of $20 million (initially) and $250 million (recently). Like Google, Twitter recently turned down a half-billion dollars from Facebook.

After this phase, Google instead of adopting the traditional money making business models waited patiently and used initial funding to ensure that salaries and sustainability are not serious concerns. They used this grace period intelligently to conceptualize and design state-of-the-art innovative technologies. The company knew that it has struck gold with its most innovative web technology of the decade, so they have to live up to their expectation.

Mantra was to go slow and step by step. Leverage on what they know best and introduce offsprings of the mother – The Search Engine. They invested most of their time on conceptualizing innovative technologies and they took their good long time to introduce them. Today when people talk about innovation, Google, 3M and Apple are always mentioned.

Twitter started off on a similar note. They just can’t follow something that has already been introduced, leveraged and exploited. What would be new (read Twitter) about it? I strongly feel that Twitter is not in a rush as of now and would be using this honeymoon time to do its home work properly and thinking about new innovative web 2.0 technologies and platform.

Twitter will definitely start making money but only with its own innovative tools and applications. To my mind, it will introduce something else to make money only if it can take the legacy of Twitter to the next level of innovation – something that is quite synonymous with its brand name.

I am not an expert in web technologies but I strongly feel that Twitter core mantra is sharing information and all its future endeavors would be around this core concept only (after all Web 2.0 is about it as well). Going forward, I feel Twitter could be thinking of something on these lines: -

1. Authentication – Today anyone can create a login and start using Twitter. Twitter can think of introducing the authentication or verification angle to it so that the analytics chalked out using Twitter would become more reliable.

2. Subscription based tweets – Tweets are the main weapon in its arsenal. All successful case studies on leveraging Twitter had one thing in common i.e. Tweets. Twitter may club it with its Authentication service and start offering specific and customized user tweets for specific reasons. It could be either surveys, analytics, customer service, sales etc.

3. Search Engine – Twitter can integrate a powerful search engine that gives the functionality to filter tweets and get only the most relevant ones as per the specific search criterion. This could become a powerful tool for the enterprise users of Twitter that can be made fee based gradually.

4. Twitpic – An interesting service to move beyond the 140 limit on Twitter and add some personalization to a dull Twitter user home page. Taking it to the next level, Twitter could think of introducing a platform for not only integrating pictures but also videos and files.

5. Another out of the box concept could be “Breaking News” service – Most of active Twitter users will validate this statement that Twitter has become an internet channel which gives them the news faster than any other news channel or resource. In real world we have plethora of TV channels and print media resources but as we are moving to the new internet world with Web 2.0, news about people who aren’t known to many, news that the whole world may not be interested in but you would, news about your friends, families, peer-group…will make the difference and who else can do this better or is equipped to do better than TWITTER.

rajagiriworld2 · 2 months ago

Twitter it's really tweets.


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Chris Voss · 2 months ago

sǝʇnuıɯ 5 ʎɹǝʌǝ ǝuoʎɹǝʌǝ puǝdsns ʇou oʇ ǝ1doǝd ɥbnouǝ ǝɹıɥ uɐɔ puɐ ǝ1qɐʇs ǝɹoɯ ʇı ǝʞɐɯ oʇ ʎǝuoɯ ǝɥʇ puǝds ʎǝɥʇ ǝdoɥ ʇǝ1

Chris Voss
The Twitter/Social Media Expert, Learn from the Best..
http://thechrisvossshow.com
¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°

Chris Voss · 2 months ago

sǝʇnuıɯ 5 ʎɹǝʌǝ ǝuoʎɹǝʌǝ puǝdsns ʇou oʇ ǝ1doǝd ɥbnouǝ ǝɹıɥ uɐɔ puɐ ǝ1qɐʇs ǝɹoɯ ʇı ǝʞɐɯ oʇ ʎǝuoɯ ǝɥʇ puǝds ʎǝɥʇ ǝdoɥ ʇǝ1

Chris Voss
The Twitter/Social Media Expert, Learn from the Best..
http://thechrisvossshow.com
¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°

hard drive repair · 2 months ago

That's too much ,why twitter is very popular ?

Kees Romkes · 2 months ago

Wake up people, it's not about the medium, it's about the users ! It's about the content, that's worth the money ! They create an infrastructure to communicate, investors want to be part of that deal, the top of the food chain, believing in what twitter already means to the community participating, it's role in the worlds' economy, the power of open, authentic communication.

The whole discussion about "how does twitter make revenue" isn't relevant at all, the community is already developing that. Twitter won't shut that down, they'll open up even more. Twitter doesn't need to make money, it's the new money... Intangiable, but there...

Sean Rieger · 2 months ago

It smacks of pre-dot com crash investments in Web based companies that couldn't figure out how to be profitable. I just blogged about this very idea here: http://seanriegerdesign.com/wordpress/?p=28

Tommy Toy · 1 month ago

This one is so obvious that it just boggles the mind. I have said it before, and I will say it again, VC's are dumbasses. It is an ego thing with them. They heard about that $200 million that those Russians invested in Facebook and could not help themselves. Their thinking process defies all responsible business logic and simply baffles the mind. Have these idiots learned anything from the DOTCOM bubble?

At least Facebook has revenues, about $600 million from online ads projected for 2009. An unnamed Facebook director recently said that Facebook would breakeven cash flow-wise.

A few gutsy social media experts believe that the ad-supported business model is busted and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for an online social network to make a profit solely from advertising. I am one of them, and subscribe to the paid-content model, and have the data to support this claim.

Thank you very kindly.