Twitter’s plan for monetization

Kevin Thau, Director of Mobile Business Dev. for Twitter shares its future business model

“We were in the middle of painting the Twitter rocketship and then it decided to take off, now everybody at Twitter is trying to hold on…Twitter is growing faster than we expected in all forms and metrics, ” said Kevin Thau, Director of Mobile Business Development today at the EconSM Conference in San Francisco, Ca. 

Just last month, Twitter’s traffic grew 3000 percent year-over-year, according to comScore metrics.    All sorts of factors have played towards adding to this explosion, from high-profile celebrity users like Ashton Kutcher, to Oprah Winfrey featuring Twitter CEO Evan Williams as a featured guest on her show.

For Twitter, this media attention and growth in userbase is great right now, but in the end, how will the company make money?  Everybody is speculating, and today Thau hinted at several different business models it's working on:

Monetizing off of businesses – Twitter could possibly set up offerings businesses can purchase to get more value out of Twitter and would like to provide more insight than already available.  

Search – As Twitter further develops its Search feature, perhaps it could grow and make cash through targeted advertising like search giant Google did.

Content deals – Television and other media outlets are looking to stay hip and interactive.  They want to be two-way with their viewers.  Twitter is the perfect tool for them.  MTV and CNN could begin to incorporate Twitter feeds to interact with their audiences.

Partnerships with carriers and cell phone devices - Twitter is currently working on partnerships to incorporate Twitter directly into mobile devices.  No further details were disclosed.  It also is exploring partnerships with carriers focused on SMS and mobile Web traffic.

Kevin Thau was firm to state that Twitter has no intention of making money off its consumers.  Twitter’s revenue will generate from the services they provide to businesses like those listed above.  

Image source - Bitten by the Bug blog