This is two days too late (but as they say, better late than never!), but Twitter is now 5 years old. Now 200 million users strong worldwide, Twitter clocks over 350 billion tweets per day. That’s a LOT of zeros. And if you’re a math whiz like I am, you’ll expertly deduce that it works out to over 200 tweets per 1/10th of a second. On its birthday Twitter announced they receive 600,000 sign-ups per day.
Not too bad for a company that still doesn’t have a proper business revenue model, raking in just $45 million in revenue last year primarily through advertising, and touching $100 million this year. This is puny compared to a monolith like Facebook, which generates revenues in the billions.
The San Francisco-based microblogging startup which was founded by Biz Stone and Ev Williams, has rejected several offers to acquire the company by interested parties — including Facebook for $500 million in 2008, Apple for $700 million, an informal $2.5 billion offer from Google and an even larger offer of $4 billion from an undisclosed bidder this year.
While nobody truly knows what’s cut out for Twitter, it is rumored that we may soon see monetization via ads in posts soon. How do you feel about that? Would you still use Twitter if there were ads? Would you pay for an ads-free freemium model?
