Twitter revenue boss defends its business model at Web Summit

Even up until four years ago the most common observation amongst Twitter's critics was something along the line of "It's nice but how are you going to make money from it?". Adam Bain, head of revenue and partnerships at Twitter, told the Web Summit that the company is feeling just fine with a revenue forecast of $1.3 billionn expected for 2015.

The major source of revenue is promoted tweets, which Bain explains can be shared, replied to or “favourited” just like an organic tweet. Instead of adding noise to a user’s timeline he argues that there is a financial incentive for advertisers to provide better content than traditional internet advertising. “There’s an economic advantage to being good rather than being loud,” he added.

Bain also spoke about another aspect of Twitter’s revenue model: ecommerce. He said that selling products through the social networking platform is a revenue stream that he expects will grow over time. Currently the Twitter “buy” button is being privately tested with several customers and there is no concrete date announced for its introduction.

In terms of monitising promoted tweets Bain says there is still a vast untapped market: the lurker. “There’s a much wider audience who experience tweets but are not logged in.”

Is there not a fear that promoted tweets will bother the user who is familiar with the old format? “Actually, in terms of ad load, ours is possibly the lowest in the business, given our size,” notes Bain.

Twitter customers also get a unique set of data for business insights as Bain points out that the social network’s corpus of data is the largest set of public conversations in existence.

This leads to many unique usercases amongst Twitter customers: health companies are looking to track the distance and spread of disease across countries by searching for tweets about feeling sick. One industrial deep fryer company (the kind that sells fryers to MacDonalds) asked Twitter if they could look for the term “soggy fries”. This is the most obvious symptom of a malfunctioning industrial fryer, says Bain with a laugh.