• Advertising Age, Monday, March 2, 2009 12 PM

Corporations have increasingly turned to Twitter as a means of communicating with their customers, particularly for monitoring what is being said about their brands. As such, when Twitter finally turns its attention to monetization, it will likely look to brand marketers first. Even so, Advertising Age's Michael Learmonth doesn't think selling marketing services to corporate America is "the kind of Google-scale business Twitter's founders and backers are banking on."

Rather, Learmonth, like search guru John Battelle, thinks Twitter will focus on search. Last summer, the microblogging sensation bought the search engine Summarize, and it has recently started integrating search into certain user accounts. "Twitter owns its own search, which is more valuable than Twitter itself," says Howard Lindzon, founder of the Twitter-based business, StockTwits.

Still, for the time being, Twitter is focused on growth, not advertising opportunities. "We're just not looking at it right now," says co-founder Biz Stone, "not just because we don't know how it would be received, but it would require a team we just don't have." Meanwhile, Learmonth notices that Twitter has inherited a similar problem to Facebook, in that it has created an ecosystem of Twitter-based businesses from which it does not profit. That, perhaps, is why search represents such an enticing opportunity.

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