Netizen

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Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas Netizen June 2009
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter Netizen April 2009
Fred Wilson

Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet” TechCrunch the dedication and deep commitment of this team to making Twitter into a world-class company ....... a key strategy meeting which took place on February 25, 2009. One of the audacious goals laid out in the notes of the strategy meeting is for Twitter to become the first Web service to reach one billion users ....... more of a “nervous system” than an alert system. ........ the strategic thinking of the company just before it entered its current phase of hypergrowth. ....... Much of the discussion at Twitter meetings throughout the past six months revolved around dealing with Google and Facebook. ......... a new Terms of Service agreement which will launch in conjunction with new APIs. These will determine what kind of

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commercial messages Twitter will have rights to monetize via ads. Twitter wants to “take a far reaching license to the content, with two exceptions (endorsement, content profit), and no opt-out.” Twitter also talked about making its API license “more throttled than ToS.”......... “Diddy values his contribution higher than we do” ......... Google product chief Marissa Mayer was a “huge distraction” who kept asking for stats on Twitter’s growth. ....... Despite the interest and attention, all the Twitter management really seemed to want was to be left alone, even by its own board members. In a May 7 meeting, they talk about how to put off informational meetings in a nice way: “How do we communicate to the Board (and investors) to back off.” ........... Some stabs at defining the company’s mission included “Twitter is for discovering and sharing what is happening right now,” and “Twitter makes you smarter, faster, more efficient and more powerful.” ......... one portion of the meeting devoted to discussing “How could Facebook kill us?” ........ going from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to one billion in 2013, with a user being defined as a “unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week.” ....... future revenue models, starting with verified commercial accounts, which is described as the “fastest way to make money without putting a whole organization behind it.” Another benefit to targeting corporate and celebrity users: “Charging more to fewer users is a good model.” .......... Search/Content Ads (with heavy users of the search API being required to run ads), Sponsored Tweets, “Adsense Widgets” (presumably Twitter ads which can run on other sites like Google’s AdSense, and in other apps) and payments. ........ “Free phones preloaded with twitter,” “TV twitter,” “Kindle,” “Radio,” “Dell, build it into,” videogame consoles, Website widgets, IM networks, and PCs. They also realize the “cost would kill us if we had a billion users tomorrow.” ........ “feeds are not unique content.” ....... Google’s blog search team was scraping Twitter’s site and getting only “60-70% of updates.” They wanted Twitter to

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hurry up with its Hosebird API so that they could start indexing every Tweet. The plan was to “include microblog content on blogsearch.google.com .......... “Why did we start talking to Microsoft in the first place”? .......... “Twitpic- To buy or not to buy (1).” They decided not to
Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013 TechCrunch Q3 2009 (which is now). A modest $400,000 was expected, followed by a more robust $4 million in Q4. ....... Twitter’s projected user growth (25 million by the end of 2009), which it has absolutely blown through already. By the end of 2010, Twitter expected to be at a $140 million revenue run rate. ........ the numbers they were targeting for the end of 2013: 1 billion users, $1.54 billion in revenue, 5,200 employees and $1.1 billion in net earnings.
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack

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