Twitter could potentially generate revenue from commerce in addition to advertising, its current money-maker, the chief executive of the company said on Tuesday.
Dick Costolo, speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen, also dismissed reports of management turmoil at the San Francisco-based company and said it is still seeing explosive growth.
“Along any axis you measure us, we’re growing faster than we’ve ever grown before,” Costolo said.
Twitter users are sending 1 billion tweets every five days and the service now has more than 200 million registered users, Costolo told the conference.
Costolo declined to reveal whether Twitter, which was founded in 2006, is profitable, but he said the number of advertisers on the platform is up 600 percent this year compared with last year, when it numbered in the hundreds.
“The beauty of the Twitter advertising platform is the ads are just tweets,” he said. “The ad system is organic to the platform.”
REAL-TIME CAMPAIGN
Costolo said Twitter gives advertisers the ability “to edit and manage a campaign in real time and distribute it globally.”
“We’ve already seen that from [movie] studios,” Costolo said. “The week before a film comes out, they’re promoting trailers on Twitter.”
Twitter users are engaging with advertisements on the service much more than they do with Internet search, he said.
“Our engagement rates are through the roof, ads with click-through rates of 30, 40, 50 percent,” he said, adding that 80 percent of advertisers have been renewing their campaigns.
Advertising will be “one of the major revenue components for Twitter going forward,” the Twitter chief executive said, but “there is a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of.”
DEPARTURES
Meanwhile, Costolo said the recent departures from Twitter of two of its co-founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, did not mean there were management problems at the company.
“While people like to focus on the comings and goings of the founders ... what’s been really going on inside the company is we’ve been building out the senior management of the company,” he said.
HIRING PLAN
Costolo, who replaced Williams as chief executive in October last year, said the process was mostly complete, but Twitter planned to hire a senior marketing executive soon.
“It’s one of the most powerful brands in the world already in its short life — the bird is recognized around the world — but we don’t really have anybody internally curating that brand,” Costolo told the conference.
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