A Yuletide Miracle: Twitter Is Profitable For 2009

Eat that, Web 2.0 naysayers: Twitter is profitable in 2009, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Twitter is still at least a few months away from integrating advertising, which could be its real moneymaker further down the road.

The key to Twitter’s surprise yearend profitability? Search deals with Google and Bing, which total about $25 million.

From Businessweek.com:

The payments Google and Microsoft were willing to make to Twitter underscore the growing value of the massive volumes of data coursing through Twitter’s network. Executives of both companies have said their technologies would be considered incomplete if they did not include the millions of messages that get posted on Twitter every minute.

“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’s Vice-President of Search Products and User Experience, wrote on the Google blog on Oct. 21, after the deals were announced.

(via Businessweek.com. image via Bottlecap Development)

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