Google chief executive Eric Schmidt was at a Techcrunch conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. He declared he was impressed about Twitter growth: “Twitter should be able to come up with advertising and monetization products that in our opinion are highly lucrative” according to Schmidt.
You may know how skeptical I am about Twitter’s strategy: not to worry about revenues, but focus on growth. Of course it is important to have the largest number of users to get the largest audience as possible. I believe it is important though to think fast how to get the platform profitable to secure revenues and hence long term growth (even if it affects the user growth).
However, Twitter is right now impressive. In the very same article you will learn that Twitter has passed My Space in terms of users. While MySpace audience is falling by 17% (which shows how sad it is for a social media company which is already decreasing), whereas Twitter gained 76% in the same time.
As Eric Schmidt say, of course that thanks to Twitter’s concept combined with the number of users it has, monetization potential is phenomenal. But it needs to become true. Twitter has already launched several potential revenue streams, as the promoted tweets feature, which is already experiencing great success, but some others haven’t the same results. The early bird initiative, a Twitter account which was proposing some discounts and special offers to its followers, have been abandoned fast.
Twitter reached 160 million users around the world, which is a security. Now I really hope Twitter is going to start generating high revenues.
