What Twitter Is Worth

Recently, Twitter went “shopping” for cash and came up with a fifty million dollar investment, but what was most significant wasn’t the amount of money raised, but the new valuation for Twitter – one billion dollars. Yes, the same company who raised money back in February and was valued at $250 million at that time is now worth four times that amount. An amazing increase in just seven months time!

Insight Venture Partners of New York has been identified by TechCrunch and other leading sites as the company who provided the funds in the most recent round of investing. Insight poured money into Photobucket when it was a young company, reaping the rewards of a sale to News Corp. in 2007 for about $250 million.

Are Ads Coming?

Twitter hasn’t brought in much money since it was founded, choosing to concentrate on building its backbone and expanding its base first before running ads. Recent changes in the company’s Terms of Services (TOS) showed that running ads was an option that Twitter would eventually which may also include allowing people to set up business accounts for a fee.

Social media sites have always been difficult to monetize as users are generally ad adverse. Place a few ads on your site and you risk having everyone leave it for the next big thing. But, if you continue to run your business model without making money, the obvious happens – your investments are all tapped out.

While Twitter isn’t doing much in the way of making money off of ads, other services are. Then again, there are sites such as Topsy which provide a Twitter tool, but are themselves not running ads. At least not yet.

Follow Me On Twitter

Since I’m on the subject of Twitter, feel free to follow my mattkeegan account. Admittedly, I probably won’t follow you back if all your tweets are product pitches, so please keep that in mind when following me. I’m a dedicated tweeter and retweeter, but only of articles I like and for friends who carefully use Twitter to build a healthy following.

See Also – Source: Insight Venture Partners Is The New Twitter Investor

I am not going to mention the blog by name, but it does deal with the automotive industry. Usually, ten articles per day are posted, pithy pieces that are packed with interesting news.

Wanted: Fresh Talent

I knew that something was amiss a few weeks back when I read on this blog that they were openly looking for fresh automotive writing talent. This blog doesn’t use bylines, so I never know who writes what article and whether that person  is new, what their experience is, etc.

However, there have been a few signs of change, which underscores my alarm when a blog that uses multiple bloggers begins to unravel.  Rather than pick apart this one site, the following are my suggestions for all blogs that use multiple authors:

Use bylines. I want to know who wrote the article and what their experience is with that particular subject matter. Include a byline and a link to your About page which offers blogger biographies. Keep the “bios” short, but do offer a link to that blogger’s personal blog.

Don’t fill space. When one or more bloggers leave, please don’t keep things “business as usual” unless you have the talent in place to fill the gap. In this blog’s case, the ten article per day threshold was maintained. Unfortunately, the quality of the articles noticeably diminished. I would prefer to read 3-5 quality articles instead of an additional 3-5 puff pieces.

Someone must take the reigns. One blogger should be the “lead blogger” and be responsible for the content on the site. Not only has the content gone downhill, but typos are on the rise. Worse, one glaring error has remained in an article’s title even though your readers have pointed the mistake out when commenting.

Getting Group Blogging Right 

TechCrunch, Boing Boing, and EnGadget are a handful of blogs using multiple bloggers and are doing this quite well. In my humble opinion any blog employing multiple bloggers needs to consistently provide well written, accurate, and interesting news or risk losing their readership.

We expect newspapers to provide solid, factual information in a timely manner, so why not blogs, particularly those blogs with multiple bloggers?

What this article is about is PayPerPost and ReviewMe, two paid blogging models that are popular with some bloggers. I’ve participated in both programs previously, but discontinued paid blogging about the same time that Google announced that penalties were forthcoming. Penalties or not, I was no longer interested in monetizing my blogs through paid posting.

Matthew Mullenweg, who is one of the architects behind WordPress, recently discussed on his Photo Matt blog TechCrunch’s decision not to accept PayPerPost/IZEA advertising after surveying their readership. Mullenweg added, “Their readers made the right decision and voted that it would be disingenuous to accept advertising from a company that, in Michael’s words, pollutes the blogosphere.”

I realize that the words uttered were from Michael Arrington who has a “history” of airing his overwhelmingly negative opinions about PayPerPost, founder Ted Murphy, and the PPP model. Oddly, TechCrunch works closely with TextLinkAds, the company who started ReviewMe. I’m not sure why one business model would be different enough to justify then the other one or whether what PPP does pollutes the internet, while ReviewMe is deemed acceptable.

I’m not taking a position in this debate, but I would hate to be in Ted Murphy’s shoes as the entire PPP model is under attack (talk about job insecurity!) Google has penalized bloggers who use PayPerPost and Murphy is finding himself responding to these attacks by leaving comments (diplomatic ones, at that) on blogs discussing PPP.

Google has changed the way that many blogs do business, leaving some bloggers scrambling to make up for lost revenue. It’ll be interesting to see whether the paid posting model can survive or whether it will be abandoned by bloggers, advertisers, and by the companies providing this service themselves.