Twitter as a social media

In december 2009, twitter signed multi-year search deals with google and microsoft, together worth $25 million, marking a watershed in its almost four-years existence. Twitter was a san francisco-based micro-blogging company offering its users the ability to send 140-character text updates, called “tweets”, which could then be read by their followers. The service proved vastly succesful-by the end of 2009 it attracted 60 million unique monthly users, more than 10 times the number of users one year before. The users included individuals, businesses, celebrities, government officials and non-profits from across the globe. Having proved its value in domains as different as interpersonal communication, organizing political protests, helping first-responders to attend to victims of a natural disaster, or allowing businesse to advertise and generate sales, twitter had also received very positive media attention.

Despite its popularity and the intial revenues, many questioned whether twitter could become really profitabl. All of its services were free and one of its features-the ability to send and receive tweets via text messages-generated substantial costs for the company. The company had considered  charging for commercial account targeted at business users, as well as offering advertising embedded in tweets. Industry pundits doubted, however, that these revenue sources would be sufficient to make twitter profitable in the long run, leaving it to the company to develop new sources of monetizing its user base.