LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. — In its gradual rise from scrappy start-up to a global communications platform, Twitter has long faced crisis after existential crisis. What kind of company is it? How do we become profitable? What the hell do people use Twitter for, anyway? Since 2006, these questions have persisted, plaguing a company still getting its legs in the Valley.
All this, despite the company rocketing into the position of public spectacle with its massive 100 million-plus user base and hundreds of millions in venture funding. Wrought with leadership struggles, executive shake-ups and a desperate search for an identity, in some respects, it was almost challenging to take the company seriously in its adolescence.
But Twitter is serious business. And Dick Costolo wants you to know it.
“We’re in the media business. We’re a distributor of content, and we’re … one of the largest distributors of traffic,” Costolo said on stage at the AllThingsD media conference on Monday evening, a forceful proclamation of company identity, right from the top. “We’re trying to build a decades-long lasting business.”
Led previously by the younger co-founders, first Jack Dorsey and then Evan Williams — both several years Costolo’s junior — Costolo brings a mature, adult-like presence to the web 2.0 start-up. And as the company’s leader, his missive has been to sharply define what Twitter is.
Naysayers, for example, have questioned Twitter’s monetization strategy — or, for some time, lack thereof. Despite a massive global reach and constituency, the company still experiments with ways to make money, sometimes to little avail.
Costolo made it clear — Twitter has a tri-partite approach to cash, and like Silicon Valley brethren Google and Facebook, it’s all about ads. There are promoted tweets, or messages in a user’s timeline sponsored by a paid advertiser. There are promoted accounts, brands or paid ads for products recommended for users to follow in the web interface. And there are promoted trends, or contextualized topics that a brand can pay for to feature prominently. Self-serve advertising — ads that small businesses can purchase on their own, much like the kind Google and Facebook employ — is slowly being rolled out, with a wider release to come this year.
And despite any speculation, Costolo says it’s working. There’s no other game plan coming — it’s all about the ads.
“We think we’re good where we’re at,” Costolo said, referring to the state of the company’s advertising platform. “We don’t feel like we need to add another component to the business in order to create the lasting company.”
First launched in 2010, the ad platform continues to retain “high engagement rates,” Costolo said. It’s no longer about introducing new product. “It’s all about scaling that now.”
That scale will certainly come externally from ad partners, but also internally as Twitter continues its hiring spree, with plans to move into a new office at multiple times the current capacity.
Of course, those employees have to come from somewhere; many, we can only assume, will come from talent poaching. Costolo boasted a large percentage of current Twitter employees — around 10 percent, or about 80 to 90 — are ex-Googlers (like Costolo himself). And with its recently released recruiting video, Twitter only wants that number to grow.
But make no mistake: Twitter doesn’t want to be Google. Currently, the two companies are publicly on the outs with one another. Twitter publicly criticized Google’s recent “Search Plus Your World” product, which integrated Google+ results into search, potentially prioritizing Google+ pages in search results over that of Twitter pages. “We would love it if when consumers search for [our users and brands], that people will find them,” Costolo said.
And it’s not like Google doesn’t have the data, according to Costolo. “Google crawls us at a rate of over 1,300 queries per second. They’ve indexed well over 3 billion of our pages…they have all the data they need.”
It’s bold speech thrown back in Google’s face, but another sign that the company is maturing under Costolo, willing to pick its battles and not fold under established Silicon Valley giants. And with its recent unpopular decision to censor tweets in countries that find them unlawful, as well as attracting criticism for not blacking out in protest of SOPA and PIPA, Twitter is willing to face public scrutiny and dissatisfaction without buckling.
There are growing pains in any start-up’s coming-of-age story. Twitter, however, looks to be coming out of its awkward phase.
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