Twitter is used by hundreds of millions of users. So naturally the social networking web site is profitable, right? Well, if it is Twitter"s CEO isn"t saying. Venture Beat reports that during the D9 conference today Twitter"s CEO Dick Costolo said, "We’re a remarkably successful business." However, Twitter is still a private company and as such it doesn"t have to reveal financials. When Costolo was asked directly during the conference if Twitter was in fact generating profits, he dodged the question, saying only, "We don’t need to optimize for near-term revenue. We need to optimize for long-term success."
Regardless of whether or not it"s making money, Twitter is working with advertisers more and more on campaigns. Costolo said that in 2010 it worked with about 150 companies by the end of 2010. The current total of companies Twitter has now worked with on ads is now between 600 and 650, according to Costolo. The total number of ad campaigns on Twitter has engaged is between 6,000 or 7,000. While that"s a relatively small amount of ad campaigns for a company with such a large reach as Twitter, Costolo claims that the engagement of people to those ads has been higher than the normal online ad campaign.
Twitter has been slow to acquire companies to expand its features but has recently it announced that it had bought the social networking organization web site Tweetdeck. It continues to add new features as well including today"s announcement that it will launch its own internal photo sharing service.