[Animats]

Coming soon: more ads. From the article: "Under a new agreement, marketers using Google’s DoubleClick advertising service can buy Twitter’s Promoted Tweets."

Twitter is in danger of pulling a Myspace. At Myspace, revenue went down, ad density was raised to compensate, usage went down, ad density was increased to compensate, then usage crashed. For a publicly held ad-based growth company, a down quarter is a disaster. The valuation as a growth company ends and the company starts to be valued based on its operations and earnings. Twitter currently has negative earnings.

Investors are now asking why Twitter costs so much money to run. Their revenue is $1.3 billion a year, yet they're losing money. They don't pay for content, their basic product isn't that complicated, and bulk compute and network costs are declining. Something is wrong there.

[boomzilla]

Compensation. I know an engineer with 3 year experience who was offered 150K salary + 600K of stock grant over 4 years. Management get paid a lot more, obviously.

[sushid]

Is this a recent offer or an old offer with current valuation of their stock? The latter seems reasonably if the stock offer had a five-figure valuation but a recent offer of 600k in stock seems ludicrous. Are public tech companies really offering that much in compensation these days?

[swingbridge]

Keep in mind that "stock" is likely in the form of options which, with the stock price below IPO, are likely worth nothing at this point.