Twitter reaches 50 million messages per day, but where is the big revenue idea?

Social networking service Twitter has reached a new milestone in hosting over 50 million “tweets” per day, the company announced on its official blog recently.

But despite the site’s success, it has still not introduced a number of services it flagged last year, including paid accounts for businesses and a significant increase in revenue.

However, the comments come as Twitter’s head of product management, Anamitra Banerji, said at an Interactive Advertising Bureau, the company is working on a new advertising platform in the testing phase.

Reports suggest this new advertising platform could be released next month at the South by Southwest conference in Texas.

In an official blog post, analytics team member Kevin Weil said the site is now processing about 1.5 billion tweets per month.

“As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we’ve grown over the past three years in terms of the number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.”

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day – that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

However, Twitter has so far not given any information on how these tweets are distributed. It is suspected a majority of these messages are coming from a minority of die-hard users.

Nevertheless, the site is continuing to gain popularity. Analytics firm ComScore said in January the site recorded 75 million unique visitors worldwide, which doesn’t include the users updating from mobile handsets and third-party applications.

But as the site grows, analysts have pointed out it continues to operate without a substantial amount of revenue. While leaked documents last year indicated the site hoped to generate revenue of $4.4 million by the end of last year, so far the company’s only funds have been from deals with Microsoft.

While it is suspected the deals are worth quite a bit of money, Twitter has not given any specifics. Additionally, recent comments from founder Biz Stone indicated the next 12 months will finally see an increase in revenue.

“2010 is really going to be the revenue year. I don’t know if we’re going to be profitable, but we have plenty of time,” Stone said at a conference. He also referenced a new type of advertising feature designed to generate funds, but so far no signs of this model have been seen.

It is suggested the current model being tested by Twitter could include a number of new revenue-generating features, and could be unveiled as early as next month at the South by Southwest conference. However, no other details have been given out by the company.

Analytics tools flagged by the company last year have also yet to appear. But Sitepoint.com technical director Kevin Yank says Twitter tends to move slowly, and this year could see some new features.

“Twitter seems to move in stages, and about every six months something is unlocked and you see a bunch of new features coming out. The last official one was the re-tweets and the site redesign, and now it seems like they are holding their breath.”

“If I was hoping for Twitter’s long-term survival then hopefully the next push would include some money-making initiatives which wouldn’t piss too many people off. The rumours we hear are of things like companies sharing accounts with multiple users in a streamlined sort of way, and charging for it, and hopefully that’s what we’ll be seeing.”