Twitter just announced that it has received another round of funding. According to TechCrunch, Twitter raised a total of $35 million in this round, which was led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners. Altogether, Twitter has now raised a total of $55 million. According to Biz Stone, Twitter wasn’t actively courting new investments, as the company still had enough money in the bank, but given Twitter’s current growth, the company decided to accept the offer.
While Twitter is growing into a very popular service, and slowly becoming mainstream in the process, its monetization strategy still remains a mystery, though the company must have some plans that obviously convinced a group of savvy venture capitalists to invest even more into the company to facilitate faster growth.
In the announcement, Biz Stone says that Twitter is now in a position to “begin building revenue-generating products.” Twitter also expects to grow its team in the next year.
Web vs. API
One interesting (though not unexpected) statistic in the funding announcement is that Twitter now gets almost twice as much traffic from its API than from the web. That number will surely drive how Twitter plans to monetize its service. If only a few people come to Twitter’s web site, then just putting advertising on the site will not drive enough income to Twitter to keep the service afloat in the long run.
Twitter also announced that it grew 900% in the last year.
