Around 285m people log on to Twitter each month—some 20% of American smartphone users and 9% of those elsewhere. It gets its content free from twittering users, and makes money by charging advertisers for such things as inserting “promoted tweets” into users’ message streams. Twitter has more than quadrupled its revenues since 2012, to an expected $1.4 billion this year. Like many technology firms, its valuation has ballooned even more. So far, however, Twitter is a more important cultural force than a commercial one. It remains unprofitable according to general accounting principles, and this is not expected to change until at least 2017. Today Facebook has 1.4 billion monthly active users, over four times as many as Twitter, and controls around 10% of all digital advertising spend in America, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Advertisers look for a combination of scale and precision in online advertising..
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