Twitter confirms major cash boost

Interesting semantics/pragmatics question. Journalists are often remarkably loose and imprecise in their use of language. In this case, however, they say

    "... the firm still has no way of making money."

This is, in fact, true. Currently the firm has (note - present tense) no way of making money. (of course, raising money from investors is a way of making money, but that's clearly not what they mean!)

You're right that there might emerge a way of making money, but the report is right when it says that they currently have no way of doing so.

So it's true that

    is not currently making money != no way of making money

but they never asserted that.

Depends. There are a couple of ways the sentence could be interpreted. One, of course, is the way that you are looking at it - that the statement "has no way of making money" is equivalent to the statement "could not possibly make money even if $name rose from the grave and demanded it." The second way to look at it is as a simple, present-tense statement: That Twitter, at present, doesn't have much by way of a revenue stream. I suspect the article is using the second one.

So with a 1B valuation from this round - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/16/twitter-closing-new-ven... we are looking at a $22+ price tag per user. This may be on the low end however as with 45 million users it is assuming that all accounts are active. I don't think that the media love affair with the company is driving all of this. If say half of the accounts are active (daily) and 10% of those are using search (weekly) then they have enough to throw an ad layer and cpa may do o.k. as part of this. If the large part of this activity is taking place via third-party then the ad layer has to be exposed in the API. Anyhow if 1.17B search queries take place annually (maybe this is low end if you include partners) and you have 5% paid click-through on that (assuming all queries trigger the ad layer) you are looking at 58.5M paid actions annually.