Twitter revenue dilemma

This is an absolute classic of Valley bubble thinking: once you have revenues, its impossible for someone to buy you at a price totally unjustified by your present ability to make money.

This is so unbelievably backwards. If there are conversations actively going on inside of Twitter or any organization about if it is a wise move to start making money, they seemingly have missed the point of running a business.<p>At the end of the day if there is some magic switch Twitter can turn to start generating revenue, they'd be fools to not turn it on. Say what you will about ridiculous valuations, but its a much stronger negotiation card to have in your deck at acquisition time if you are actually you know, generating money, and don't need to sell the company because you will run out of cash otherwise. Until then, Twitter runs the risk of the world basically realizing (or at least thinking) the emperor has no clothes and running out of cash before getting bought by someone still drinking the kool aide.

<i>The company has to decide whether or not to turn revenue on. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a real decision. Once revenue is on, how the company is valued by the market can change dramatically.</i><p><i>So when Twitter talks about turning on revenue, it isn’t such a small decision. They have no idea how much money they can make off the service. Selling data to search engines, display ads. Search based ads. Premium/business accounts, etc. There are no comparable revenue streams at other companies that they can fully rely on.</i><p>I think the more accurate revenue <i>dilemma</i> is how any of those items mentioned above are going to generate meaningful revenues.

Turn on revenue? Did I miss the point where they actually discovered how to make a profitable social networking service?

Interesting post. Explains why they may not put ads against their search page. People will think:<p>"okay, is this the best thing they can think of"<p>or<p>"do they need the money?"<p>or, as the article says:<p>"whatever they are making, that's about all they'll make unless they grow more"

I'd bet they're making quite a bit of money now just in licensing fees to use their logos (among many other possibilities they're not going to reveal).