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Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

what do you do? stick ads all over the place! what do you think, you have a business there? like twitter? yeah, sure, raise another 200 million...

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make fun of twitter, and you get down-voted. I know, I know, Google will buy them for 4 billion in 2011, but that is the only exit strategy they have. No biz model there, sorry.

Just to let you know why I've downvoted you twice: Twitter has millions in revenue a year.

Thanks for cheating (down-voting me twice).

10 million, or something like that.

From ONE customer. who could well drop them.

So, they're breaking even (for now).

And all this while they have raised 360 million in VC money (crunchbase).

And nobody has a clue how they will make REAL money.

Or do you?

It's not cheating. You made two comments that added nothing to the discussion. They're offtopic and just full of vitriol.

They have more than one customer, first of all. They have two. ;)

But seriously, if you can't imagine how a company that's collecting real-time data about the thoughts of millions of people around the globe might make money, you might want to pay more attention to Google...

Cheers.

so, now it's three down-votes (but it's perfectly ok on three comments :)

They could perhaps be useful (I personally do not find much value in the "real time web") - to either Google or Bing.

So, one of the following is going to happen:

-Google buys them

-Bing buys them

-Google and/or Bing continues to keep them afloat

-none of the above, and the service gets either shut down, or bought up for a fraction of its current valuation.

Nope, once I reply to you, I can't downvote you.

p.s. up-voted: you're right on the off-topic and vitriol part.

Twitter's been profitable since their Google and Bing search deals lit up around last November.

yeah, "profitable". Let's say at break even.

And yet somehow they needed 200 more million, for a total of 360 million sunk into that ship. Do you have a clue of how profitable a company in which 360 million dollars were invested needs to be? Do you really see them ever getting even close to being that profitable? How?

Having worked from Twitter's office in late 2009, I'm privy to a bit of their financials from that time and onward. They're definitely profitable since then.

Profitable companies often raise money... I don't see why this is out of the ordinary. It lets you scale and make more money more quickly. Another startup I worked for did the exact same thing as soon as they became profitable.

yeah, sure, for example, they could sell data about their tweets to search engines other than Google and Bing. Oh, wait, too bad there are none - or not in the parts of the world where people use Twitter, anyway.

so, yes, 200 million on top of 160 million already invested for a company that is making 10 or 20 million at most and that has no other way of making money in sight is, well, yes, I would dare say quite out of the ordinary.

all right, guys, group-think wins, I lose. Have a nice day!

Where are you getting this 10-20mm number? That wasn't even accurate (it's too low) a year ago.

The value of the deal with Google alone was 30mm. That's just a single facet of their monetisation strategies. They've also introduced Sponsored Tweets and a bunch of other things since then.

Fun fact: Twitter actually violated their SLA with Google and Bing before the first month was even up. They guaranteed a maximum amount of time between a tweet being published and it being available via the commercial API access given to Google/Bing.

FYI, I am not downvoting you. I can't even downvote yet. I don't even like Twitter and think it's mostly a waste of time.

I don't know, someone made a comment in reply to me the other day that said "Twitter could be another Digg" and everyone seemed to love it.

I sure do :)

I somewhat like Twitter. I avoided it for a long time but I've come to enjoy and accept it. Facebook, on the other hand, is one of the worst entities in the entire world.

Have you seen this? - http://business.twitter.com/

how much money do you think they can make with that?

I don't really want to offer my random guess against your random guess of "not much money". Why not wait and see? What vested interest do you have in seeing Twitter fail?

I hope Twitter makes a lot of money and lasts for a long long time. It will be good for the world.

I have no vetted interest in seeing Twitter fail, nor do I think it will. I think Google and Bing will keep it afloat for a long time until they figure out how - or if - they are really interested in the so-called "real-time web".

A subdomain isn't a business model.

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