Search Marketing News

Twitter 'to become profitable for the first time'

December 30th 2009
Social Media Optimisation News

The micro-blogging site Twitter is going to be profitable for the first time, various media outlets have reported.

Popular with both members of the public and search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists, Twitter will conclude 2009 with revenue of around $25 (£15.63) million and operating costs of between $20 and $25 million - showing that a slim profit is not impossible.

Twitter has received payments of $15 million from Google and $10 million from Bing for being listed in the search engine's real-time search results, according to reports.

Commenting on the deal, Mayank Bawa, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aster Data, said: "There is a lot of value in understanding social repositories of data - [for example] there is a lot of value in analysing Wikipedia and trying to understand how topics are connected."

Twitter's lure for search engines is linked to the data it generates, with Mr Bawa noting that "public data is actually very useful: you can [use it to] collate people's opinions."

Twitter currently has around 22,481,568 unique monthly visitors in the US alone, and has enjoyed major growth over the past year of 546.35 per cent.

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