10 Things Twitter Won’t Tweet
1. “You say social media site, we say advertisement-delivery system.”
After much anticipation by investors and fans, the microblogging service Twitter (TWTR 0.00%) in September finally filed an initial public offering. On Thursday, the site said it would price its shares at $17 to $20, which would value the company at $11.1 billion. It is expected to be one of the most popular stock offerings in recent history fueled by the site’s rapid growth in users — which numbered nearly 232 million by the end of the third quarter, up from roughly 49 million three years prior — and its wide-reaching impact on fields ranging from politics to entertainment.
Social networking experts say Twitter will likely undergo many changes after it becomes a publicly traded company. For one thing, it will probably target ads more specifically to Twitter users. In July, Twitter announced it would soon begin experimenting with the ads it shows users in the U.S. by “displaying promoted content from brands and businesses they’ve shown interest in.” Retailers, for instance, can provide Twitter with information on which users have visited their sites, and Twitter will try to match that up with users’ Twitter accounts to show them promoted tweets from that retailer, Twitter said in its announcement. (Twitter users who want to maintain their privacy and don’t want this information matched can uncheck the “Promoted content” box in their account settings.)
Advertising is a big and seemingly growing source of revenue for Twitter. Eighty-five percent of its $317 million in revenue in 2012 was generated by advertisements, according to the company’s S-1. For the nine months ended September 30, ads accounted for 89% of its revenue.