Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Tells Developers to “Move Up the Value Chain” (Video)

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo shared details and perspectives about Twitter usage, developer relations and monetization in an interview with Walt Mossberg today at D9. He also introduced new photo and search products.

Here are some of the choice tidbits, as well as a video highlight reel.

On Twitter traffic:

“There isn’t a third party that we’ve seen yet that can correctly measure the Twitter audience. The reason we don’t share [active users] is because it’s so syndicated and distributed. We’ll share that number when we have a better sense of what our network traffic is.”

But Costolo would say that a billion tweets are created every six days, and less than half of Twitter usage is on its Web site (the rest is from various mobile and desktop clients).

On competing with Twitter developers, the latest example of which being Twitter’s new native photo-sharing feature:

“We have over 600,000 of these developers. Anything we do is going to have some overlap with what they do. What we will try to do as a company is signal where we’re going so we can give you room to move up the value chain. Everyone has to understand we’re going to innovate.”

On monetization:

“We’re a remarkably successful business. Over 80 percent of all the advertisers who have advertised on Twitter come back and renew.”

Volkswagen placed a promoted tweet that had an engagement rate of 52 percent. “Of all the people who saw the ad, more people engaged with it than didn’t. That’s just unheard of.”

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

D Conference Mailing List

Sign up for News about D Conferences

My friend’s three-year-old walked up to the TV and swiped and nothing happened and he said, ‘Dad, what’s wrong with the TV?’

— Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder Marc Andreessen on the tablet generation