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At least somebody's making money on Twitter

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Aug 13 2009

Dell announced this week that they've made $3M on Twitter. They were smart enough to harness this one-to-many communication network at virtually no cost to deliver significant revenue to their outlet stores.  They're capitalizing on a surprising statabout tweeters - the top 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% account for about 30% of all production. This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.  Advertisers get that.  Anderson Cooper gets it.  Does Twitter?

Twitter's shattered many social network paradigms in a relatively short period of time - growth rate, gender, engagement levels, and of course, the creation of a socially classless community. The latest numbers from Nielsen indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% Y/Y in February, registering a total of more than 7 million uniques in the US for the month.  But they've had to raise $57M in VC money to do it. So what now? They're long-term viability is kinda predicated on turning this movement into money.  Board members have suggested an ecommerce play, others and ad model, and still others a subscription based service. TechCrunch leaked some internal docs projecting $1.54 billion in revenue by end of 2013, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users.  But of course, no information about how Twitter plans to achieve those numbers was included.  Based on Dell's success, maybe they should consider a rev share model . . . what do you think?

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