Facebook Makes Half A Billion While Twitter Searches For A Few Million
Today there has been a fair amount of buzz today about Marc Andreesen’s comment, stated during an interview about his new venture fund, that Facebook should surpass $500 million in revenue this year. It’s not quite a surprise but what’s more interesting is that the company is on the fast track to billions while Twitter, the thorn in Facebook’s side, has yet to bring in any substantial revenue although a few initial advertisers have been buzzed about.
As I previously wrote, Twitter needs to implement Facebook Connect, not only to continue increasing their user base but also the potential for a monetization strategy. Facebook has an existing advertising platform that lets advertisers target ads on a variety of demographic variables. While the CPMs may be low, it would be one option for generating some initial capital in a relatively non-intrusive way.
At this point I’m sure just about any company, including Google, is looking for a deal to help monetize Twitter but so far the company has avoided anything as costs continue to mount. Twitter is just about as large as Facebook was two years ago, but Facebook was at least operating near break-even at the time. Regardless of Twitter’s monetization strategy, Facebook is clearly focused on building in a lot of the features that are included in Twitter but all hopes of killing Twitter have been dashed.
With $500 million in revenue and a recent influx of cash, I’m certain there’s some type of agreement the two companies can come to.
