Twitter turns profitable, but international traffic stalls

Social networking giant Twitter has reportedly begun to turn over a profit after it signed multi-million deals with internet and software groups Microsoft and Google earlier this year.

But the deal comes as new analytics figures show traffic to Twitter is beginning to plateau, compared to rival Facebook which continues to record higher numbers of unique visitors each month.
As reported in BusinessWeek, Twitter has signed $25 million in deals which will make its content searchable by Microsoft and Google. These deals were recently announced by the two companies, which said “tweets” would be indexed in real-time search results.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Marissa Mayer, Google vice-president of search products and user experience wrote on the Google blog in October.

According to two people familiar with Twitter’s finances, Twitter will receive $US15 million for the Google deal, with the Microsoft partnership worth about $US10 million.

“The deals were huge,” one of the insiders told BusinessWeek. “With two strokes of the pen, a lot of revenue came in.”

The deals come after Twitter earlier this year said it would begun earning revenue, but did not specify any methods for doing so. However, it is expected that new enterprise products with subscription models will bring in money, including accounts which will allow businesses to view detailed analytics data.

The two sources also said Twitter has been able to turn a profit by reducing many of its expenses. Previously the company paid telcos to distribute text messages over networks, but now the service’s popularity has given it a bargaining position in order to bring down prices.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s international traffic has continued to flatten, according to new data from analytics firm ComScore.

The figures reveal Twitter recorded 60.3 million unique visitors in November, compared to 48.3 million in October. In the US, traffic rose by just 100,000 visitors to 19.37 million unique visitors, after an 8% decline in October.

The decline in traffic has been noticed by the company, with co-chief executive Evan Williams saying in an interview earlier this year that: “We are seeing slowing growth in some areas, and accelerating growth in others”.