Ad Industry on Twitter’s Potential

Now that Twitter raised $100 million in funding and the social-networking site was valued at some $1 billion, can it make money from advertising? AdAge.com explored that question with some industry experts.

Canaan Partners venture capitalist Warren Lee:

I think they can build some kind of ad business, but the more relevant question is can they build an ad business worth $1 billion-plus? That would require tremendous volumes of impressions and reasonable conversions. Lots of execution will be needed. Not impossible but unlikely.

SocialMedia CEO Seth Goldstein:

It’s the first one that’s not a destination—it’s a distributed service. There is no precedent for how to monetize it.

Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker:

What we see is a move away from brands using broadcast media to more engagement media. If you have engagement on a one-to-one basis, extremely scalable, that’s valuable.

Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow:

What is interesting from an advertising perspective is the same thing that is interesting about Facebook: It is one of the only platforms of scale that has two-way messaging potential. But are they a $50 million or a $1 billion business?

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