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The State Of Twitter, The Startup That Can't Kill Itself
Brad Stone has a long story about Twitter in Bloomberg BusinessWeek today.
If you aren't familiar with Twitter, it is absolutely worth reading.
If you are, here's the gist of it:
Twitter does, in fact, have advertisements, and Dick Costolo is funny.
More highlights:
About 90 employees at Twitter are former Googlers, according to the report.
Twitter works closely with Apple thanks to its CFO Ali Rowghani's connections as a former CFO of Pixar Animation Studios — another Steve Jobs company.
Since 2009, Costolo has expanded headcount from 45 to nearly 900.
Costolo worked with VC Peter Fenton and Bill Campbell, an Apple board member, to get co-founder Jack Dorsey actively involved in Twitter again.
Costolo has developed six-hour leadership courses, which he administers to senior executives four times a year.
Twitter makes money with licensing deals, like its one with Microsoft to include tweets in the Bing search engine.
Advertisers pay only when a user retweets a corporate tweet or clicks on a link. Twitter says it has an engagement rate of 3 percent to 5 percent, compared with less than 0.5 percent for normal banner ads, according to BusinessWeek.
Walt Disney paid $120,000 for its Toy Story 3 promoted trend, which sat atop the list of popular topics for a full day.
The Newt Gingrich campaign paid Twitter to ensure that tweets with a petition’s link appeared each time Twitter users searched for “Newt Gingrich” and “Mitt Romney.”
Here is Costolo's pitch to advertisers: “These accounts I follow paint a very compelling picture of the kind of person I am, even if it doesn’t paint a picture of exactly which uniquely identifiable individual in the world I am. I think that allows us to deliver powerful value to advertisers, and powerful value to those who want to speak freely.”
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