With the capability to integrate ads into search, tweets, and their main interface, Twitter has an absolutely golden opportunity in their hands to turn explosive growth into explosive profit by developing (even with Google or Facebook, who both derive most of their revenue through their respective ad platforms) an ad platform, and they're throwing it away simply because, in their own words, they don't know any better.
"There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don't have anyone there to make or take those calls," said the executive, whose real name is Christopher Isaac Stone.Maybe one of the most amateur and childish things I've ever read from a chief executive. So, what do they plan to do?
Stone said on Monday that Twitter would remain free for consumers and businesses, and that the company's main focus at the moment is developing new features for commercial users, such as "lightweight analytics" and a directory of commercial accounts that would verify that businesses on Twitter are legitimate.Ever heard of HootSuite? Tweetburner? Any of the other thousands of Twitter tools out, for free, on the internet, that make Twitter so great? To any observer, it doesn't make sense for Twitter to branch out into paid tools simply because thousands of other people are already doing, probably better, and most of all--free, thanks to their innovative API. Anyone who thinks that Twitter can generate the amount of revenue that they need to become profitable by marketing paid services that already exist for free is terribly misguided.
Overall, I think this confirms two themes in Twitter's epic explosion over the past six months:
1. They need an Executive: While Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the genius algorithms behind Google, Eric Schmidt made it the giant that it is today. If Twitter is going to become more than just another web service (which, I think, it has the potential to do), it needs to move beyond the startup phase and into the realm of a serious business that makes decisions on more than intangible emotions. By hiring an Executive with the experience and education necessary to make tough decisions and run an effective company, Twitter can move to the next step and start to realize the potential that it is brimming with. While creative and tech guys are the hearts and souls of their companies, businesses still need brains; if they want to be successful, Twitter needs to graduate from the minors and hire an executive.
2. Twitter's growth could be astonishingly useful: One of the first things that I thought after reading the article was that, maybe, Twitter's founder's don't understand what they hath wrought. Twitter's pure, unbridled growth over the past six months suggests that they struck a goldmine in creating a platform that is easy, fun, useful, and highly adaptable. However, by abandoning the idea of advertising, it's almost as if they don't understand where they are. In advertising, information is power, and Twitter's growth has given them more information than they could ever use. Through pulling abstract data from ongoing conversations, Twitter could create a more attractive advertising platform than even Google AdWords.
