According to a recent Bloomberg report, Twitter plans to target a handful of large corporations currently using the service to generate its first revenue this year.
While he would not release exact sales figures, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was quoted in the post as saying, “The idea is if they are getting value out of Twitter, then we could add more value to what they are doing and we could get some revenue… We think we’ll get to something this year, however simple, that shows we’re making some money.”
Services to be offered to the companies may include account verification, statistics and analytics, and multiple account management. However, almost any imaginable feature Twitter could offer is already being pushed by third-party services. Account verification, which has already been implemented for a handful of celebrities’ accounts, is the only feature that only Twitter can provide, at least for the time being.
While many organizations and individuals claim to have made modest to massive amounts through their Twitter marketing (e.g., Dell cites a sum of $3 million made through its Twitter efforts alone), the microblogging service itself has yet to announce a concrete monetization strategy, much to the consternation of the larger tech community.
Twitter was recently cited by comScore as being the fastest-growing web property. With 18 million users, it is also the third-largest social site.
The company has received funds of around $55 million dollars from a bevy of private investors and VC firms so far, according to various announcements they and their investors have made since the startup launched in 2006.
