Twitter’s chief executive Dick Costolo (News - Alert) made some weighty comments about the company at an industry conference this week.
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Costolo hinted that the social media giant might start paying people to post tweets, but did not elaborate on details, according to a blog post by The Wall Street Journal.
Costolo opened the door to sharing revenue with Twitter (News - Alert) users that post interesting content on Twitter, though he said Twitter wouldn’t pay such ‘content producers’ for each tweet they post. “Our thoughts are a little more nuanced,” he said, adding that Twitter would have a “narrow set of publishers we would do that with.” Costolo didn’t elaborate further.
Twitter is still worth far less than Facebook (News - Alert), but the CEO of the micro-blogging site also announced during the Web 2.0 Summit that the company is now valued at an impressive $8 billion, TMCnet’s Ed Silverstein reported.
“Let’s just call it an even $8 billion,” Costolo said in response to a question, according to a report from the Business Insider.
Addressing questions about Twitter’s $8 billion valuation, Costolo told the audience that Twitter does not “need money for a long time.”
The Journal also reported: “Costolo said Twitter doesn’t need money for a long time and besides, ‘we don’t want to have to be beholden to an IPO window. I want to go public when the company’s ready and prepared…and not at the whims of some window,’” he said.
Costolo also came forward to say that Google (News - Alert)+ is clearly attempting to compete with Twitter, by incorporating elements of both Facebook and Twitter into its social network.
According to the Journal blog post, Costolo said, “It’s early days. [Google has] “made clear they’re going to compete on features” such as games, but Twitter is “going to compete on simplicity.”