'Too late for Twitter to be profitable'

12:18 14th January 2010

Micro blogging website Twitter has lost its opportunity to become profitable, according to Jason Falls, a social media consultant and blogger on socialmediaexplorer.com.

"I think they've waited way too long to build a hugely profitable business model, but there are derivatives they can grab onto," he said.

Mr Fall said one idea of generating revenue could be to have an app store and make developers pay for access to the application programming interface. However, he said, the company has let many apps develop with no money exchanging hands.

While some businesses have been able to make money from their own Tweets, Twitter itself may find this difficult, Mr Falls added.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported in December that Twitter's content search deals with Microsoft and Google had earned it £15.3 million.

Separately, data collected by Nielsen published in November suggested the 'Twitter-verse' was perhaps shrinking as US traffic to the site fell by nearly ten per cent from September to October 2009.

Written by Derek Oldman ADNFCR-1667-ID-19557282-ADNFCR