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Twitter Closing $800M Funding Round at $8 Billion Valuation

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Re: Twitter Closing $800M Funding Round at $8 Billion Valuation

#5
post #2

Why is Twitter so slow to find a good business model, while Facebook is profitable?

Why try and achieve something hard like profitability when you can easily be valued at $8b and raise $800m to keep that going?

I don't mean to be too critical but sometimes I wonder if this is better than, say, Twitter finding out that it can't make more than some small amount of money in profit.

Re: Twitter Closing $800M Funding Round at $8 Billion Valuation

#6
post #2

Why is Twitter so slow to find a good business model, while Facebook is profitable?

Facebook is profitable, yes. Most of people (edit: instead of most I said '99%' but that's not true so I updated) use FB from their browser going to facebook.com (or searching facebook on Google and clicking the first link), while Twitter is used mostly in desktop/mobile apps.

It's a bit more difficult to develop a business model for Twitter than for Facebook, which is profitable with "just put ads on the right of everypage".

But: shouldn't a company as huge as FB be many times more profitable that they are right now? (400M$ in profits in 2010: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/goldman-unit-passed-o... at a 75B$ valuation if I recall correctly).

Anyway, my point is Twitter & FB business models are not & i'd guess won't even be similar, and it'd difficult to compare them.

Re: Twitter Closing $800M Funding Round at $8 Billion Valuation

#8
post #3

Why does selling a 10% chunk of a company value the remaining 90% at the same price?

layman: the 800M$ funding & 8B$ valuation numbers affect each other. It woulnd't be raising 800M$ if not valued at 8B and it wouldn't be valued at 8B$ if the funding round wasn't 800M$

Re: Twitter Closing $800M Funding Round at $8 Billion Valuation

#10
post #2

Why is Twitter so slow to find a good business model, while Facebook is profitable?

Twitter's data set is incredibly valuable; Twitter won't make money from ads, they will make money from analyses of their data [1]. Developing infrastructure and software that can analyse the sheer quantity of data Twitter generates takes time — and money. But, when they finally crack it they will be extremely profitable. It's much easier for Twitter to do this opposed to Facebook (who I would say is also interested in doing this) because of Twitter's public by default culture (/policies).

[1] If evidence is needed: they just bought BackType; They're starting to lock down and sell their APIs rather than give it away for free as they realise the data's immense value.

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