Twitter upset the applecart on Friday when it announced it would no longer license its stream of half a billion daily tweets to third-party resellers.

The social media site said it had decided to terminate all current agreements with third parties to resell its ‘firehose’ data – an unfiltered, full stream of tweets and all of the metadata that comes with them. For companies that still wish to access the firehose, they’ll still be able to do so, but only by licensing the data directly from Twitter itself.

Twitter’s new plan is to use its own Big Data analytics team, which came about as a result of its acquisition of Gnip in 2014, to build direct relationships with data companies and brands that rely on Twitter data to measure market trends, consumer sentiment and other metrics that can be best understood by keeping track of what people are saying online. The company hopes to complete the transition by August this year.

Naturally, the news comes as a massive blow to the third parties who were making a living by selling Twitter’s data. The biggest of these is DataSift, a startup which TechCrunch notes has raised almost $78 million in investor capital to date, and now suddenly finds itself caught with its pants down. Also caught short is NTT Data, which only deals in Japanese language tweets.

DataSift CEO Nick Halstead confirmed the news in a statement posted on the company’s website, and later told TechCrunch that he was “blindsided” by the announcement, which apparently came without any warning. Previous to Twitter’s announcement, DataSift had been involved in talks with Twitter on renewing its deal to sell firehose data, Halstead said. He added he didn’t think DataSift’s recent deal with Facebook to sell its firehose data had impacted those negotiations.

“We were in the middle of negotiations with everything pointing to Twitter wanting to still continue to be a part of an open ecosystem,” Halstead told TechCrunch. “But this is clearly now not true.”

So why has Twitter decided to take this action now? Money, of course. According to Vindu Goel in the New York Times, Twitter seems to think it will be able to make far more by selling its data directly than through third parties. Data licensing and other services generated Twitter $147 million in its last fiscal year, but it’s an area the company has only just began to tap into.

“We see the data licensing business as extremely complementary to the advertising business,” said Chris Moody, the former chief of Gnip and now Twitter’s vice president for data strategy, in a February interview. He added that once businesses understand the customer insights they get from tweets, they will ask “when I want to advertise something, where would I turn? Twitter.”

Now it’s clear that Twitter’s deals with third parties will not be renewed, and the company’s priority is building up its own big data business going forward.

Firehose access will officially be cut off on August 13th, at which point customers of third party data resellers are encouraged to migrate to Twitter’s Commercial APIs through the Gnip product suite, or to the Public API.

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