Where's the Money?

According to Jeff Dowler, apparently there is little to no revenue stream currently being produced by Twitter. His research comes from a Wall Street Journal article that I don't feel like paying for, but apparently the company only had an underwhelming 45 employees as of this past May. With no cash coming in, since Twitter is free and does not advertise, they really are going to have to come up with something if they wish to stay in business with their current growth rate. I am still having some difficulty motivating myself to keep tweeting this week with interesting content, let alone have to pay for it first. There are already some little annoyances that I hold towards Twitter- its servers are slow, when they are actually up, the interface could be a lot easier-- but I personally don't think advertising would be an awful way to make some money. FB doesn't annoy me so much when it does... or does it?

A Lil' More Seattle

Reading some of the blogs in class, it did become apparent that profit was a cause for concern. Really, how are these hyperlocal blogs going to make money through mostly hyperlocal advertising? I tried using the example I found in order to see if they were making anything out of the deal through their informal partnership with the Seattle Times. I checked out one of the participating hyperlocal blogs, and didn't find very much on the announcement of the partnership outlining the revenue goals, for obvious reasons. I found more interesting results in a business-oriented blog, on the part of John Cook's coverage of the partnership.

Cook doesn't announce anything groundbreaking-- he repeats the same phrasing that the official announcement did when it came to advertising: One of the goals is "Exploring tools that could enhance advertising opportunities across the partner sites." However, in the comments, things get a bit more interesting when a user says he thinks the passive banner ads are lame, and an employee of West Seattle Blog shows up. Apparently, even though one of the goals specifically says that they will explore new forms of advertising, according to Tracy at WSB "the Times partnership doesn't involve any discussion or collaboration on revenue generation at all." She defends the current system in place that features local business on a long, long list of banner ads-- or as she calls it, a business directory. A long, completely unorganized business directory. Anyways, I was hoping to see some collaboration of sorts on advertising and revenue, but it looks like that portion of journalism, arguably the most important considering these journalists want to make money in order to live, has been left out of the experiment.