The Twitter Files
By Anna Johnson on July 20th, 2009Twitter was hacked last week and a whole pile of confidential corporate documents were leaked to technology blog, TechCrunch. Now that TechCrunch has made a number of these documents public… what were some of their key discoveries?
Perhaps most interesting were the internal Twitter financial forecasts prepared in February 2009. While Twitter told TechCrunch that these were not official and no longer accurate, they do provide some insight into Twitter’s expectations at the time…
Firstly, Twitter expected to make its first amount of revenue – $400,000 – in the third quarter of 2009 (i.e. now). The company expected this to be followed by a massive $4 million in revenue in Q4, $140 million in revenue in 2010, and $1.54 billion in revenue.
Meanwhile, with $45 million in cash at the time (having raised $55 million in venture capital), Twitter expected the cost of each Twitter user to be just over $1 per year.
In terms of users, Twitter expected to have 25 million users by the end of 2009 (already exceeded). It then projected 100 million users in 2010, 350 million in 2011, and 1 billion users in 2013.
Twitter also expected to have 5,200 employees and $1.1 billion in net earnings in 2013.
According to eMarter senior analyst, Paul Verna, Twitter’s growth projections are overly optimistic and, in particular, there are significant barriers to widespread Twitter adoption.
Verna points to findings by Nielsen Online that only about 40 percent of the service’s new users return the following month, and a Harvard Business School study indicating that most Twitter users send an average of just one tweet in their lifetime.
Reality also certainly seems to be lagging behind expectations when it comes to revenue. At this stage, Twitter is still yet to implement any major initiatives for generating revenue…
Sources: Michael Arrington, “Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013,” TechCrunch, July 15, 2009, eMarketer, “The Inside Numbers on Twitter,” eMarketer, July 16, 2009
