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Comment by luso_brazilian | Hacker News Reader

> Revenue in the recent period rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $731.6 million, buoyed by data-licensing sales and video advertising.

I understand video advertising and if Twitter turns their attention to this area (after dipping their toes on Vine and Periscope) Youtube and Twitch may get a competitor. Now what does "data-licensing sales" means in this context? User data?

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Twitter acquired a company called Gnip back in 2014[1]. This company built a SaaS business off licensing Twitter's firehose of tweets, in various forms, to various industries. For example, my company, which provides real-time web/content analytics to high-traffic websites, licenses Gnip's real-time API of tweets so that we can do analytics on those tweets and embed them inside our customer-facing products. That revenue ends up counted in Twitter's data licensing sales. Other popular use cases include PR media monitoring systems (e.g. Brandwatch), news alerting (e.g. Dataminr), and even finance (e.g. Bloomberg licenses Twitter data for its terminal[2]).

I wrote about that data licensing business here:

https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-conundrum-8339eda1...

Even though Twitter isn't growing DAUs quickly (and possibly will never do so), it is actually a pretty diversified business. It has a multi-hundred-million ARR SaaS business embedded inside a multi-hundred-million user consumer destination site, which primarily monetizes through a billion-dollar self-service advertising business.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/twitter-acquires-longtime-...

[2]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/bloomberg-twi...

Assume data-licensing refers to selling access to the tweet firehose and things like their premium search API [1].

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/a...

> Now what does "data-licensing sales" means in this context? User data?

It's likely their firehose feeds and things like that https://developer.twitter.com/en/enterprise

Expect it is access to tweet data via the API, e.g. social media listening tools that monitor for trends across Twitter and other platforms.

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