I have always been fascinated by Twitter. While some people think writing something that is only 140 characters long by its nature has to be superficial, I am a great believer of the power of brevity and - in days of information overload - indeed also the need for brevity.
And as integrating a link (leading to more content) in your tweet is easily done, the 140 characters rule can be easily broken, as done by many tweets which simply act as signposts to a much longer piece of text.
The Twitter business model, however, is a different story and for some time has puzzled me as well as others, as Twitter kept very silent about it for a long time and also seemed to make the point that, unlike Facebook, advertising revenue would not be the main revenue.
This has the world waiting, some in doubt, some in expectation (including myself) what the business model might eventually be - a question that has gone unanswered for a long time, especially if you consider the value attached to the company and its growth pattern.
Now, as the recent interview wih Adam Bain from below shows, the answer is here: The revenue model, without mentioning numbers, is predominantly advertisement-based and indeed the advertising part of the business has experienced a phenonemal and rapid growth in the last 18 months resulting in there now being a solid base of 2,400 advertisers on Twitter.
It was a very interesting interview, but the answer still comes to me as a little bit of a disappointment: I guess I had expected something slightly more innovative and novel, something that counterbalances the competitive disadvantage that Twitter in my view has in the advertising arena, when compared to, for example Google and Facebook: less customer insight data that their competitors, the latter of course a key pre-requisite of focused customer targetting and marketing success.
On the other hand, I think, there is an awful lot to be said for the clean and simple 140 format and the requirement for a succinct advertising message to be developed by advertisers - a challenge and opportunity for advertisers at the same time ! A space worth watching !
