Twitter May Be Profitable. No, Seriously | Hacker News Reader

Twitter May Be Profitable. No, Seriously

gigaom.com

35 pointsdabent19 comments

Twitter cannot afford to be just profitable. The amount of money already invested on Twitter requires it to be out-of-the-charts wildly profitable. That's the key issue.

Twitter's investors may need them to be wildly profitable. Twitter itself probably doesn't vanish if they aren't. And in the current VC climate, Twitter probably had a lot of leverage negotiating terms.

Twitter needs to be off-the-charts profitable...eventually.

In the meantime, ordinary profitability would relieve a lot of pressure to optimize for the short term in order to raise money.

The amount of money already invested on Twitter requires it to be out-of-the-charts wildly profitable.

How does Facebook compare in this regard?

Facebook needs revenue like the GDP of a small country to succeed.

Really? I don't see that. Only on the order of $100 million has been invested in Twitter so far, from what I've been able to find. Given that their revenue is already a quarter of that I don't think there's a requirement for off-the-charts wild profitability here.

As the revenues are dependent on search deals with Microsoft and Google, predictions like this one from an expert such as Rand Fishkin would have serious implications if borne out:

This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here

Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance.

This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment stats have their usability folks up in arms already...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-predictions-for-seo-in-2010

Given all the speculation about "spending lavishly" on C-level executives and other such stuff, I wonder how much longer Twitter engineers can expect the soda to be free for? ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750

When I worked at the Twitter offices, the real free perk was expensive Belgian beer. The dynamic was this - the service would go down, the devs would work to bring it back up again, and then some grateful and wealthy Twitter user in the valley would send over some fancy beer as a thank you.

I often wondered if this was creating perverse incentives, but I sure liked that fancy beer.

What's the point in raising $155mm if you aren't going to spend it on growing like crazy? Otherwise it'll just sit in the bank lowering the average return.

(Free soda comes under 'development expenses' in my view.)

maybe != may be. No, seriously.

was going to crack that three spelling/grammatical mistakes/omissions in five words is pretty impressive :)

It took me a while to understand the title because of the mistakes.

Poor grammar makes you hard to understand.

I hope they don't splash out on "C-Level executives" frankly. Dick Costolo is pretty strong as COO material and I don't think Ev needs to go anywhere. This is like saying Google needed to add C-Level execs in 2002.

link to the source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1jw...

Twitter may be profitable (in some distant future or in some far-away universe)

all right, all right, kool-aid drinkers! ;-)

The article cites a few more facts than you do. Sure, maybe Google and MS pay less than 35 million combined, and maybe their operating costs are more than 25 million. If so, then they aren't profitable. But if those numbers are right, then they are profitable, plain and simple.

So the article is not just kool-aid drinking.

that's not like being really profitable. In the future, twitter may be (two words) profitable. but I doubt it.

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