With news that Pownce, a social networking and micro-blogging service, was sold to Six Apart and will be shut down on December 15th, a number of individuals starting asking the age old question yet again – how will social networking make money? Tack on Twitter turning down a $500 million dollar offer from Facebook and people started asking “Forget social networking in general, how will Twitter generate revenue?”
Speculation over potential revenue models has been out in the media for some time regarding the popular messaging service. Give people a set number of tweets per day and charge after that, go after the enterprise market and sell a business service, and sell access to the Twitter API were all suggested as potential ways for the company to pull in money.
All along the company has remained silent, and now the CEO says the revenue is coming… but is being a tease about it.
“We will make money, and I can’t say exactly how because…we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.” As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.
But as the conversation went on, one got the impression that Williams actually has a plan. He revealed that the company is in talks with large consumer packaged good companies, and whether that’s to sell the company internal services or to help the company monetize its own Twitter feeds, it’s promising.
Either the company has an idea as to what they will do, and they are attempting to protect their “trade secrets”, or they have no clue and Twitter is flying by the seat of its pants. Knowing the history of start-ups, a number of people could easily say there is no real plan – I will bet differently.
Why?
Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was a co-founder in the popular blogging service “Blogger”, who ended up selling his service to Google. Obviously past performance does not guarantee future success, but he does have a track record I would bet on at this point.
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