UPDATED 14:26 EDT / SEPTEMBER 08 2011

The Little Bird that Could: 100M Twitter Users Ripe for Ad Revenue

Twitter is celebrating a new milestone today.  Twitter’s blog boasts that 100 million global active users are now tweeting on the microblogging site to share their thoughts. Twitter serves average 230m tweets a day, with half of its active user base visiting the site daily. About 40 percent of active users use Twitter’s service to hone in on the latest developments around the world.

And to add to the milestone celebration, the company has raised close to $800 million huge funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, according to a recent report from Fortune.

Twitter’s website alone exceeds 400 million monthly unique visitors, 55 percent of those are on mobile devices. The growth is more than 70 percent higher compared to start of the year.  The company plans to increase that number to close to 200 billion devices.  Twitter claims it will add a further 26 million active users by January–that’s more than its 2006 to 2009 users combined.

The new statistics comes just after a day as Facebook reported its revenue has doubled to $1.6 billion in the first half of the year. Twitter wants to prove that it can generate more revenue from its advertising system, and more importantly, start making real money from it.  In fact Twitter’s Chief Executive Dick Costolo said that Twitter is on an expansion phase to extend the advertising system. “I get 100 ideas a day for things Twitter could do to make more money,” he said.  “I don’t think we need to do that. Advertising will sustain us.”

The company has decided to let other advertisers ping users as part of their promoted tweets programs.  Twitter in return will share the revenue from promoted tweets with third party developers.

“Right now, when you log in, you’ll see accounts to follow or similar content in the right column,” said Costolo. “Promoted tweets will work the same way. It will be based on the interest graph of the accounts you follow. So you should be seeing the kind of content you’re already interested in.”

Twitter is also teaming up with Microsoft to make tweets searchable through Microsoft’s Bing search engine, thanks to the renewal of a two year contract.  And if rumors are to be believed, Twitter will ask for some licensing fees as part of the partnership with Microsoft. The company is looking for other revenue streams, like sporting events on Twitter’s site, and ticket sales.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU