Twitter valued at US$1billion
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by fred on 18-09-2009
Tagged Under : Twitter value
Twitter is closing a round of funding that will value the company – known for its 140-character, stream-of-consciousness blogs – at US$1bil, technology news site TechCrunch reported on Wednesday.
The company will raise around US$50mil, and chief executive Evan Williams told employees about the funding round, TechCrunch said, citing multiple unnamed sources.
A February round of funding led by Benchmark capital had valued the company at around US$250mil, TechCrunch said.
Twitter and other social networking sites have been hardpressed to show that they are viable businesses and that they have what it takes to eventually make a successful public offering or private sale.
Worldwide visitor’s to Twitter’s website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over-year, according to comScore data.
But the San Francisco-based company has only recently begun to focus on ways to make money from its free service.
“When something like Twitter or Facebook becomes a cultural phenomena, it’s much more than the sum of the parts. It’s really tapping into a cultural shift,” said Salil Deshpande, a general partner at venture firm Bay Partners.
“As the network effect increases, the value increases,” he said.
Twitter’s Tweets are 140-character text messages published to subscribers known as “followers”, and the service has become a phenomenon among news junkies, Hollywood watchers and many investors.
Last week, Twitter revised its terms of service to state that its service could contain ads that, among other things, target “queries made through the services.” — Reuters
