[mindstab]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Twitter.

They are one of the most successful internet things and yet they still don't seem to have any really solid way to monetize that. They are now part of culture but are they revenue positive?

The things they are doing lately don't make sense until you take that into account:

Restricting 3rd party apps and APIs? Seems to be driving users away... Except that if all your users are costing you money, then less users is in fact good.

And the only money making thing they seem to have is "paid tweets" that you are forced to see (aka ads) and so yeah, obviously they don't want 3rd party apps and APIs that could filter that one weak still mostly crappy source of money. So if they loose some freeloading users, why would they care.

So yeah. Why has no one else mentioned Twitter in this discussion as the grand-daddy-king of unsustainable companies?

[rapind]

Is restricting 3rd party apps and APIs really driving users away though? Do you have any data to back this up? I suspect it's having a negligible impact on their user count, but I'll believe you if you show me some data.

I think their road map to financial success is mainstream media related (second screen etc.).

[scott_s]

Twitter sells access to its raw firehose. You may not be willing to pay for it, but many large companies are.

[bane]

Right, it's akin to a wire service for news organizations, and it's priced similarly not surprisingly.

[gsmaverick]

Except that it's not unsustainable and in fact doing pretty well in terms of revenue (http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-ad-revenue-reach-13...). I know it's fashionable to hate on Twitter but it flies in the face of reality.

[eli]

What's wrong with selling ads? You could argue that Twitter is doing it poorly, but I don't think it's fundamentally different from what, say, Facebook or LinkedIn are doing.

[riffraff]

doesn't LinkedIn make a bunch of money on their premium service?