Twitter: “We don’t have a business model ?! Ha ha (3 times) ... "

"... We have them!" - confidently declares a competent citizen.
Investors know better ... A



successful journalist Scott (link to his post), whose last name is not important to us, managed to talk heart to heart with one of the co-owners of the Spark Capital fund (Boston) - the man’s name is Todd Dagres .

Todd with his fund is known, in particular, for being in time in the right place and giving Twitter money (along with the smart guys from New York, from another fund - Union Square Ventures) in the first run for bills (round of investments) .
In total, $ 20 million was anxiously transferred .

So, returning to the interview with Todd, we remember that he did not just pass by. Actually interesting Todd did not say much, for an experienced man. But he still let go of the remark about the business model and was courteous:

“We are already giggling a bit nonsense when we hear chatter about the lack of a business model on Twitter ... We know how we are going to do this, and we are absolutely sure about how we are going to do it. But right now it’s not at all in our interests to tell left and right how we are going to do this ... We have a business model that still needs to be implemented ... But, of course, I can’t guarantee that it will work ...
One day, you all notice a sudden change on Twitter. They will not worsen, of course, virality and usability - but you will immediately understand how we will cut loot on our Twitter ... "

Then Todd thought and added:" We are not in a hurry, but this is our plan for 2009 because ... "The

conversation took place on February 25, and on February 27, Evan Williams (the founder of Twitter) himself was already giving interviews on TV to Charlie Rose (one of the most famous interviewers in the USA, such as Larry King, who asked Putin where the boat is? - and Putin said she drowned).

So, Evan himself did not say anything sensible about monetization again . Namely:

"I do not know yet. We have some ideas. They must, like the service itself, evolve over time. We are going to try a couple of features and see how they work. I think this is not a question - can we generate enough dough for survival (like we can). <...> The question is whether we can only hack for survival or start chopping like men (like Google). <...> In general, it seems to us that we have many opportunities to monetize.
For example, we can start demanding money from users (we could charge users at some point), or take money for some thread with additional bows, or we can start to give some kind of thread advertising - we haven’t given it at all yet. But here it’s necessary to somehow intelligently, so that users would like it, and the fat sponsors were happy - such as Google need something to come up with. ”

Then they chatted a little more about the fact that social services are extremely difficult to monetize, and the search is not difficult. But Evan believes that Twitter is something in the middle between Google and Facebook.
I mean, Twitter is less social than Facebook, but more social than Google.
The explanation is “when I'm on Twitter, on the one hand, I get tweets from my dad, and on the other, I can search for other people (except dad, obviously) talking about the latest iPhone model” ... I want to say - well ... what and I’m doing ...

(no, I’ll still give an exact quote, so as not to become a victim of slander attacks:
“Twitter is somewhere in between, because of the fact
that I get my dad`s tweets, but I also get - I also will do searches and
find out what people are saying about the latest iPhone. ”)

I recall as an epilogue that Twitter recently received another $ 35 million from a group of sensitive men in the second race.
Also knownthat Facebook had a serious conversation with Twitter last fall on the subject of buying the entire shop for from $ 300 to $ 500 million in Facebook shares.
But Twitter began to be greedy and whimpering that the FB shares had no IPO at all, and they valued them at $ 2-4 billion (while the FB itself was absolutely convinced that it was worth $ 8-9 billion).
Then Twitter suggested evaluating the number of shares that the FB would have to give them - according to the IPO, which the FB would arrange anyway for all the concession participants with the Zuckerbergs at the head have long wanted money.
On what the FB blew its nose in the grass, and the negotiations didn’t work out anymore ...

Well, then, we will follow the development of boring events ...

Update.I completely forgot why I wrote all this. And in order to chastily ask: do you, startupers and ordinary people, see how Twitter can earn a lot of money (except for the banalities that are higher)? Imagine that you are Evan

Update 2. Damn, I forgot to add important conditions for the task: about 750 thousand people a day; more than 2000 different web services and programs through which users send tweets; about 6 million registered users.