Respected tech blogger Robert Scoble wrote yesterday that he believes Twitter is “underhyped.” He says the popular social networking service should worry tech titans like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook. Scoble says he now understands “why Ev Williams didn’t take the Facebook deal of about a half billion dollars” last November. Never mind that the company has no real revenue stream. Twitter, he says, “is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.”
More from the posting:
“But, Scoble, I don’t see how Twitter will make money,” I can also hear you saying. Here’s the rub, when you have every business in the world hot and bothered about using your service, which Twitter is heading toward VERY QUICKLY then you’ll be able to make money. How? Charge for business services. I know businesses would pay for better analytics. Better hooks into their lead generation engines. Better team collaboration services like TweetRiver, which is what we use at Rackspace to manage our Twitter accounts. And more features. How much would they pay? Many businesses would pay a hundred a month, maybe even more.
Check the full posting HERE.
I just left a comment on his post:
Disclaimer: I’m the founder and CEO of www.postling.com.We built Postling because we believe that focusing on just Twitter or just Facebook is missing the bigger picture: businesses are adopting social media at an amazing rate, and a successful social media strategy means using the complete portfolio of tools - blogging, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, etc. While early adopters might be comfortable with logging into 5 different websites every day, real businesses are too busy and too overwhelmed. And we’ve found that consolidating all of your social media activities into one place can turn 20 minute tasks into 2 minute tasks. Consolidating all of this activity through one platform has some really amazing benefits…
So the real question here isn’t about how much Twitter is worth, it’s how much is social media worth? How much money is generated as a direct or indirect result of all social media? How quickly is that growing?
