September 9, 2008
Twitter valuation $250 million?
Twitter looking to snag some serious cash to get it through the 09 recession
At at a time when valuations are coming crashing down for Internet companies, Twitter may very well end up doubling its valuation.
Twitter is looking to raise some serious cash, according to a report by TechCrunch over the weekend. Apparently, $250 million is the company's valuation and they already have IVP signed up on the term sheet.This is well above the nearly $100 million valuation the micro-blogging site had last year.
From the report, "Rumor is Twitter hit up more than a few venture firms to pitch the $250 million valuation, and got more than one no.”
Back in November of 2008, Facebook attemped to acquire Twitter for $500 million, but Twitter rejected the offer, due to the proposition consisting mainly of stock as opposed to actual cash. Facebook and Twitter share a key similar feature, micro-blogging. While some bloggers are using Facebook's "Status Update" feature, others are tweeting away on Twitter's "What are you doing?" updates. Facebook is currently valued at $4 billion. Microsoft had valued Facebook at $15 billion back in 2007.
Twitter, with 4.5 million unique visitors per month, is obviously making sure to snag some investments for surviving the economic downturn and comfortably fleshing out its yet to be business model.
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What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Where did the idea for Twitter come from?
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
How is Twitter built?
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
How do you make money from Twitter?
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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