It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products. 2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even). 3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures. 4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to understand trends almost perfectly (from both news stories and users).
I think people on HN and the like sometimes massively underestimate why Twitter is so important. Twitter as a big social network like Facebook is never going to happen. Their decision to pursue that route seems foolish in retrospect. Instead, what Twitter has is a smaller group of users that are extremely influential. Moreover, they have the most effective fan-out messaging platform in existence.
I think focusing on monetization/user only makes sense while TWTR is an independent company. Companies like GOOG, MSFT, etc. benefit greatly from the externalities of owning TWTR more than the business itself (consider Youtube, for example).
I totally see someone famous buying Twitter just to own it, or another company like Disney who just wants it to break-even. It has cultural and influential value now separate from profit.
If the valley is an echo chamber (it is), then Twitter echoes louder than most things I can think of. Very few companies have the kind of reach and influence within the valley that Twitter has.
Perhaps the gossip magazines should pool their money and buy Twitter?
That power can be used to make massive amounts of money.
Right now you're suggesting that e.g. Disney is buying Twitter, for 17 billion dollars, to implement an untested business case. The cost of failure in that case is at least the purchase price of Twitter, that seems like a massive gamble.
I don't think Twitter is worth $17bn, but we live in an era of excessively hyped up and unrealistic valuations, so I have no idea what the correct price actually is. Yes, buying Twitter is a gamble, but many acquisitions are.
I don't understand why people keep saying this. Twitter has multiple billions of dollars in revenue from monetizing their users.
Profitable? No. They built out a massive organization planning for user growth comparable to how fast Facebook was growing, but user growth stalled. There is a profitable business within Twitter, but someone has to be willing to do the gut job.