How does Twitter make money? [Twitter Business Model in 2023]

Snigdha
By Snigdha | Last Updated on March 4th, 2024 1:47 pm | 4-min read

The microblogging site Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms across the globe. The platform users can create small posts called tweets and share them on the app. The reason why it works is that today the average attention span of your customer is 8.25 seconds. Whether you want to create a personal brand, promote a brand, or create buzz for your clients, the one thing you must do is keep the message clear and crisp. Twitter is perfect for this as it gives you 280 character limit to convey your message effectively without rambling on. Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams came together to co-found Twitter in 2006 after their plan to launch Odeo was bungled by the emergence of Apple’s iTunes. Today, Twitter is a social media giant with 237.8 million global monetizable daily active users (mDAU) across the world. If you are looking for an opportunity to make money from an app, it is a good idea to make a social media app like Twitter. It is important to understand its business model to know how to make money from your app.

What does Twitter do?

So what is it that Twitter does which has made the platform such a huge success among users of all types of users like businesses, professionals, journalists, celebrities, and more? Anyone with an internet-connected device can create an account on Twitter for free and join the platform. The users can now tweet their thoughts in 280 characters or less while attaching photos, videos, etc. Users can follow each other, celebrities, brands they love, influencers, etc., to subscribe to their content or tweets. Twitter app users can also send DMs to their followers or other users on the platform. The site has always been just a little controversial and hence, has garnered massive popularity across the world. The social networking site Twitter has millions of users across the world and has content for every imaginable interest. In recent years Twitter has been marked with controversy for banning accounts of users who expressed ideologies that were in direct conflict with the ideologies of Twitter’s top management. It was observed that many people with center or right inclined who were vocal about their opinion were either shadow banned or ousted from the platform altogether. The most controversial of these bans was in January 2021 on Donald Trump, former President of the USA.

How does Twitter make money?

Twitter makes money in two different ways - selling ads and data licensing. The bulk of the revenue comes from promoting advertising as a strategy for marketers to get quick results. In Q2 of 2022, Twitter’s revenue was more than USD 1.17 billion. Of this 1.17 billion, a little more than 1 billion came from advertising, and the rest from data licensing.

Twitter Advertising

There are three types of ads on the platform, viz. - Promoted Ads, Follower Ads, and Trend Takeovers.

  1. Promoted Ads

    Promoted ads are regular tweets that have the label ‘Promoted’ displayed clearly on them. These promoted ads appear quite like regular tweets on user timelines, search results, or profile pages. Twitter uses its algorithm to analyze user interests and then serves these promoted ads or Tweets to the relevant ads. These promoted ads are based on a pay-for-performance or pay-for-impression model with the pricing through auction.

  2. Follower Ads

    Follower Ads or Promoted Accounts are quite like Promoted Ads, but the ad is for accounts that a user may find relevant enough to follow. These ads are used by account holders or platform users who want to grow their community. The pay-per-performance ad model is used here, which is served through auctions.

  3. Trend Takeovers

    Like all the other advertising categories, this one, too, is labeled as promoted and appears at the top of the trending topic list on the platform or timelines for an entire day in a targeted country or all across the world, depending on the advertiser’s choice. The advertisers are charged on a fixed-fee-per-day basis.

Data Licensing

Data licensing brings in the rest of the 14% of revenue for Twitter. Apart from the public application interface program, Twitter sells subscriptions to public data to companies and developers who are interested in accessing and researching real-time and historical data pertaining to the platform.

How to make an app like Twitter?

There is a lot of scope and potential if you create a social media app like Twitter. However, mobile app development has often been associated with complex programming, thousands of dollars worth of investment, and months of hard work by professionals. With Appy Pie’s app builder, however, things are different. You can create an app in minutes without emptying your bank account. Here’s how you can do it yourself!

  1. Enter the name of your app

    Name your app before choosing the right app category, color theme, and test device. You can now personalize your social networking app with your brand logo and content.

  2. Drag and drop the right features

    Add relevant features to your social media app without learning to code. You can now edit the app to your specific requirements.

  3. Test your app and publish it now!

    Test your app on a real device of your choice to see how the app works for your app users. Publish your app on Google Play Store and Apple App Store

Related Articles

Snigdha

Content Head at Appy Pie

Most Popular Posts