[truthtechnician]

I'll bite. Here's why I don't think Twitter is profitable or will be:

1) No ads. I don't see any now. "But, they can add advertisements later!" No they can't. Adding advertisements to Twitter will destroy their brand and everything that makes them "cool."

2) No clear picture on their profits and revenue. Profitable companies or companies with a solid revenue model have nothing to hide. There's no reason to hide your money situation if you're successful or have a successful strategy. Twitter doesn't. Their strategy relies on selling to the VC community, not selling to users.

3) Buying up competitors before you're posting profits means twitter's only asset (users) are hard to maintain control of.

[jonursenbach]

Twitter already has ads thought, and has had them for a while now.

Promoted Tweets.

[timjahn]

From what I've read, I don't believe their current monetization techniques are making anywhere near enough money to equal what's been pumped in from funders.

[jonursenbach]

Probably not, but income is income.

[xentronium]

1, 3) Fair points.

2) Promoted tweets, api firehose. Their tries at adding ads to twitter certainly sucked, though.

[waterlesscloud]

There's that whole "metadata" part of a tweet that goes largely unused. It could carry an ad payload displayed on certain clients.

Perhaps on Tweetdeck, as a random example.