Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said at the Reuters Technology Summit on Monday that the ubiquitous microblogging start-up isn't considering an advertising-based business model at all.
The whole "we'll make money by offering corporate accounts of some sort" mantra has been talked about by Twitter's founders quite a bit recently. But until this point, Stone and co-founder Evan Williams haven't been quite this explicit in ruling out advertising altogether.
"There are a few reasons why we're not pursuing advertising--one is, it's just not quite as interesting to us," Stone said at the event.
Man, it sure is nice to be so high in Silicon Valley's pecking order that you can rule out a business model just because it's boring!
The other reason: Hiring an ad sales staff is labor-intensive, Stone told Reuters. Ads can also be intrusive to users. Now that makes a bit more sense.
The long-awaited Twitter business model, which the Reuters article describes as "various add-on tools and services for the businesses and professional users of Twitter," should be in effect by the end of the year.
Twitter's co-founders are singing a new song when it comes to explaining why they famously haven't put a business plan in place yet: it's too expensive!
Maybe I'm being a little bit mean there. But in a video interview with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, the so-buzzed-it's-ringing-in-your-ears company's founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, said possible revenue strategies are currently in the process of getting bounced off the walls.
But, they said, it will invariably take some time because the company has a whole lot else to deal with--you know, monster worm attacks and ravenous fail-whales, which sort of makes you wonder when the plague of locusts will come along--and it's still a small start-up.
"We're doing a lot of research right now, and we're laying some groundwork," Williams said to Swisher. "We have very limited resources still--less than 40 people--and that's not very many to just manage the size of the service we have right now. So there's a ton of stuff we want to do on the product side, some of which we think are very complementary with revenue-generating stuff, but it's going to take us a while to experiment on that."
Translation: There aren't very many people on Twitter's payroll, and even though the company is extremely well-funded by top-notch venture capital firms, it's not willing to burn through its funding at the risk of being short-sighted on innovation. Twitter has, however, started making notable business development hires.
Stone chimed in, "The idea of recognizing the difference between profit and value, and defining value...for us, value is making a great service, making a great user experience, putting out a good network, a robust network worldwide, and focusing on features and feature development, those types of things. That's value for us. And profit will come later, when those things are achieved."
It's so adorably Silicon Valley of them.
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