Twitter is hard at work on figuring out ways to make money from its fast-growing microblogging service, but advertising, apparently, is not one of them. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on Monday said one revenue stream the company is pursuing is developing add-on tools and services -- such as "lightweight analytics" -- for professional users of the site, which will be introduced by the end of the year. But he dismissed the idea of selling advertising: "There are a few reasons why we're not pursuing advertising -- one is it's just not quite as interesting to us," Stone …

Scribd, a document sharing site, is beginning a beta test of an ecommerce platform for Web publishers, in an effort to tap into news companies' increasing interest in charging consumers for digital content. According to PaidContent.org's David Kaplan, the startup believes that the rise of Amazon's Kindle has made the notion of buying texts online more acceptable. The document sharing company also plans to launch an iPhone app that lets publishers sell their content directly to iPhone users. Unlike Amazon's rev-sharing model for the Kindle, which takes as much as 70% of the revenue from some content …

Will 2009 be remembered as the last days for free content on the Internet? Perhaps, says the International Herald Tribune's Eric Pfanner, if Rupert Murdoch and his media mogul contemporaries have their way. Murdoch last week declared that he would personally end the "malfunctioning" of the newspaper business by charging for News Corp. content. Other media companies, like The New York Times Co., have said they are also looking at ways of charging readers for news content. Will the plan work? Unlikely, says Pfanner. He notes that even The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, two …

SolarWinds, a software maker, and OpenTable, an online reservation service, will be the first venture-backed IPOs in nine months, marking the end of a long dry spell for the IPO market for venture capital-backed deals, The Wall Street Journal reports. "There's no question people are going to be looking at how these entities fare over the next couple of months," said Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association. Even so, most venture capitalists don't expect a meaningful pickup in IPOs this year or next, said Heesen. The Journal points out that few companies are …

Naked Pizza is one of many small businesses that use Twitter as a marketing tool. In an Ad Age report, the company reveals that it recently brought in 15% of a day's business by running a promotion via Twitter. "Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful," said Jeff Leach, the restaurant's co-founder. The campaign targeted users who were within a three-mile radius of the restaurant. Leach says he even put up a billboard outside of his store publicizing Naked Pizza's Twitter handle.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will start testing a paid download model for accessing the company's vast library of online video content, Dow Jones reports. Stewart said she has been exploring the possibility of charging consumers for online content for several years. The test, which begins next month, uses iAmplify's content management platform. "It has to happen," Steard said during a panel discussion at a media conference in New York. "We will see monetization on the Web." She did not reveal details about pricing for the new service, ,but said that the majority of content on the Web site …