Tag: revenue

Twitter generates $3million revenue for Dell

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Back in March, this very blog suggested five ways in which Twitter might be able to make money.

Suggestion one was entitled “Companies must pay!” and highlighted how businesses were benefiting from free advertising via the microblogging site.

Today, it has emerged that computer giant Dell has made $3m from advertising its products via Twitter, with a third of this coming in the last six months – the period in which Twitter’s popularity has exploded.

This may seem small peanuts compared to the $12.3 billion of revenue Dell earned during the first quarter of this year, but $3million is still a whole lot of moolah. And it doesn’t really seem fair that Twitter won’t see a single penny of this.

The good news for Twitter is that Dell, who had previously dismissed the idea of ever paying Twitter for its service, may be coming round to the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. They’ve admitted that Twitter offers a unique service that is incredibly useful in terms of marketing.

The web is full of affiliate links whereby commission is paid to sites linking to products – it’s what makes the free-content based system viable. It seems a bit silly that one of the web’s most popular systems isn’t involved in this system.

(via PC Pro)

Paul Lamkin Internet

Universal Music: We're getting heaps of cash from YouTube

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For a long time, Google has struggled to monetise its video-sharing site, YouTube. Experiments with advertising have been coldly received by the community but perhaps things are starting to perk up – the executive vice president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs, Rio Caraeff, has said that his company is getting “tens of millions of dollars” from YouTube.

Universal is one of a handful of companies who have a deal with YouTube where ad revenue from Universal’s content is split between the parties. As Universal has a hell of a lot of back-catalogue content, that’s a decent chunk of revenue, but “tens of millions” is far more than I would have expected.

Duncan Geere Digital Music, Online TV

How Facebook nearly bought Twitter

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When it comes to Social Networking sites, Facebook is the current undisputed king. When it comes to microblogging and ‘status update’, however, Twitter rules. Facebook knows this, which is why it offered US$500 million’s worth of stock to Twitter, three weeks ago, to buy it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Twitter rebuffed the offer. There were concerns that $500 million of Facebook stock wasn’t actually worth $500 million, as well as worries over how Facebook would integrate the service into the site.

Lastly, it seems that Twitter wants to have a go at seeing if it can make any actual revenue itself first, before letting someone else try. After all, despite having considerable outgoings in server, SMS and staff costs, Twitter doesn’t actually make any money at all. Yet.

Duncan Geere Web 2.0, Websites