MediaPost on Twitter's monetization

MediaPost on Twitter’s monetization

But the two roads to revenue signified by these two bits of news diverge in a wood, of sorts. And I’m wondering if Twitter, like Robert Frost, should take the road less traveled.

The ad platform, obviously, promises to derive money from advertising, the tried-and-true revenue stream that’s helped every media property from Collier’s magazine to Facebook.

The Yahoo deal, as with relationships Twitter has set up in recent months with Google and Microsoft’s Bing, calls for Yahoo to pay Twitter for the “firehose” of data the new relationship will bring to Yahoo.

The money has always been in the data and the API. The public has been slow to realize this because they never SEE the API, and they’re always working through an interface.