Adfero: Does anyone know how much bird feed costs these days?

Well what i actually mean is how much does it cost to feed a bird? and the answer is in the case of the little twitter bird it is somewhere near $100 million. Although the exact amount has not been disclosed twitter released information on its blog on Friday (25/09/09) that it has 5 new investors (i won’t list them as you can see it first hand from the “birds mouth” on http://blog.twitter.com/). It was greatly publicised that they were looking for investment in the region of $100m and speculation is that they have achieved this or close to.

Now if you think of this in terms of the dragons den (which it isn’t), then twitter has no way of making money.....at present. There are all sorts of reports, speculation, blogs talking about how they intend to monetise twitter, obviously most of these involve some sort of advertising - from spam tweeting people, banner advertising right through to people selling their twitter followers through e-bay or in time twitter brokers. All twitter themselves have said “Do we hate advertising? Of course not” (reassuring to investors surely that they do want to make money). And in terms of how they intend to do this the only indication from twitter is.....

“The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue. However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling. We're going to leave the door open for exploration in this area.” http://blog.twitter.com/

So what in the world does this have to do with news, Adfero, online news consumption, or any of the Adfero staff or products? well the fact that twitter can get that kind of investment with no way of making money just shows how much people value online as a communication and information tool. Especially when you consider in the last 12 months the Evening Standard was sold for £1 (and debts) and News Corp announced £4.4billion losses in Q4 2008. There is no wonder that online marketing spend has overtaken TV advertising spend (as reported yesterday in the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8280557.stm )

I wonder if once it matures the twitter bird will lay the golden egg.