Twitter to step up “promoted tweets” in bid to cash in on growing user base
09 Sep 2011
Twitter will soon have more ads or what it calls ''promoted tweets'' in its stream of tweets CEO Dick Costolo told reporters in a meeting with a group of reporters yesterday at the company's San Francisco headquarters. But the company's IPO will have to wait for some time he suggested.
After inducting more management talent and upgrading its service to allow it to handle huge spikes in messaging, Twitter is gearing up for building a successful business.
That however, does not mean that the 5-year-old Twitter will go for an initial public offering of stock in a hurry, a move that would require the company to publicly disclose how much money it was making, for the first time.
Twitter can do without the money as it is flush with the $400 million it raised from venture capitalists and other investors. With such a large financial cushion, Twitter was not likely to pursue an IPO next year Costolo suggested.
"We now have what can only be referred to as a truckload of money in the bank,'' Costolo said. "We did that because we want to be in control of our destiny and grow the company the way we want to.''
The best way to go about that for Twitter, according to Costolo, was to show more ads to Twitter's worldwide audience of 100 million active users, and with half of those users logging on to Twitter daily, it could be taken as a sign that the service was becoming addictive.
