Twitter, the popular personalized syndication service, on Friday revealed how it plans to make money.
San Francisco startup Twitter, which has raised enormous heaps of venture capital with only a dismissive attitude about a business model, dropped the detail at a TechCrunch conference at the city by the bay. Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said the company plans to add advertising in 2010, according to a Bloomberg report.
“We will have an advertising strategy,” he told the New York-based news service. “We want to do something that’s organic and in the flow of the way people already use Twitter -- and not, ‘Here’s the tweets and here are the ads.’”
Twitter has been pumped with $155 million in venture capital from the likes of Insight Venture Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and Benchmark Capital, among others, without so much as the hint of a business model. But the wildly popular message service boasts some 58 million users.
The syndication startup, which allows people to transmit messages no longer than 140 characters, also told the news service that it had revenue of $4 million a year. That revenue comes from a data-mining agreement it forged with Microsoft and Google, the startup said.