It must be hoax!

How does twitter make money? This is something I often wondered. After all, I’ve never seen a single advert on twitter. So if they’re not selling adspace, and it’s a completely free service, how does twitter make its money? It’s a simple question, and deserves a simple answer.

So here is is. A quick answer to a quick question.

Google and Bing pay Twitter for their ‘firehose stream’. The ‘firehose’ is a stream of data (tweets) about trending or popular topics. Google and Bing use the firehose to get unique comments on these trending topics. This is the major source of profit for Twitter. It may seem like a waste of the search engine’s money, but it is actually quite useful for them to seem more up-to-date and personal.

There are also the promoted tweets. These are basically advertisements in themselves. Companies can purchase promoted tweets to try and generate more interest in their business. The result is the same as if Twitter was selling adspace –Twitter makes money, and businesses get more interested customers.

So that’s it. That’s the long and short of it. Twitter may introduce other features in the future to generate profit from, like a premium account of some sort. But, for now, Twitter will remain completely free to the everyday user.