Around the Net
Twitter To Triple Ad Rev By 2014?
- Bloomberg, Tuesday, January 31, 2012 11:58 AM
By 2014, Twitter is poised to triple ad revenue from $139.5 million in 2011 to $540 million, reports Bloomberg, citing a new forecast from eMarketer. Key to such growth, increasing popularity overseas will decrease the microblogging platform’s reliance on U.S. advertisers. As such, the percentage of dollars coming from the U.S. will fall to 83% in 2014 from about 90% this year, EMarketer forecasts.
“Twitter’s global reach also is forcing the company to adjust how it manages content,” Bloomberg points out. “The site announced last week that it will add the ability to censor posts by country, rather than deleting messages for the whole world.” In the past, if the government of a country asked Twitter to take down a post, the company had to do it globally. Still, Twitter still won’t be able to operate in some nations, such as China, Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo said, this week. “We would love for people in China to express themselves,” he said at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Media conference. “Under the current situation, that’s not possible.”
In the near term, political ads will be important to Twitter in 2012, said Costolo, who became CEO in 2010. “He has sought to bring more of a business focus,” Bloomberg notes. “We have figured out the business,” Costolo said. “The advertising model is working.”
