Twitter Business Model

The Business model of Twitter

In one short sentence, the business model of Twitter can be phrased as follows: "Twitter is a mass-scale marketing platform, in which every tweeter is a marketer and every follower a set of eyeballs and a potential re-marketer."

2006 - A Fresh Start

In 2006, Twitter launched, and several times, there was criticism because their business model or, more specifically, their revenue model was not clear.

People always want to know what a company is up to: 'How are they going to make money?' Until there is a question, people will stress that point.

The founders always said they had no rush finding a business model. They just followed Google's approach (build a service that many people like to use and then figure out how to make money with it).

2010 - Growing up

In 2010 Twitter started with was Promoted Tweets. Promoted Tweets are paid tweets that advertisers can use to appear at the top of a search result page for some time. Also, they introduced Commercial Accounts.

2011 - Smart Changes

In 2011, Twitter introduced Promoted Trends. Promoted trends are flat-rate daily ads that generate huge numbers of impressions in a day. They are costly.

2012 - Playing Poker

In 2012, Twitter introduced Twitter Cards. With that, Twitter follows Google and Facebook in encouraging greater advertising plus enabling development by others on the Twitter platform.

Stay tuned for new updates because Twitter's business model is still a work in progress!