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Twitter's Adam Bain at Web Summit: 'Sure enough there are thousands of people tweeting about soggy fries...'
Twitter’s Adam Bain (left) at Web Summit: ‘Sure enough there are thousands of people tweeting about soggy fries’ Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian
Twitter’s Adam Bain (left) at Web Summit: ‘Sure enough there are thousands of people tweeting about soggy fries’ Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian

Twitter: why #SoggyFries make for a tasty future in big-data revenue

This article is more than 9 years old

But advertising still key to social network’s growth: ‘In terms of billion-dollar revenue ad businesses, we’re the fastest growing’

If you’ve ever tweeted in anger after being served soggy chips in a restaurant, you may be fuelling Twitter’s growing business in selling big data to businesses.

At least, that’s according to the company’s president of global revenue Adam Bain, speaking at the Web Summit conference in Dublin this morning.

He cited a recent deal with a deep-fat-fryer manufacturer as an example of the kind of small-to-medium sized business that might be willing to pay for access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data.

Bain said he’d been initially doubtful of being able to provide any value to the company by licensing this data, until he found out they were planning to scan Twitter for tweets about “soggy fries” – apparently a sign that a restaurant needs to upgrade or replace its equipment – then give those businesses a sales call.

“I went to Twitter, and sure enough there are thousands of people tweeting about soggy fries,” said Bain, who said that while Twitter’s big-data revenues grew 171% year-on-year in its latest financial results, that area is in its early days. “Expect more from us soon on the data business,” he said.

In a bullish on-stage interview, Bain talked up Twitter’s main source of income: advertising. In the third quarter of this year, Twitter’s $361.3m of revenues was up 114% year-on-year, including $320m of advertising income – with 85% of that coming from mobile ads.

“In terms of billion-dollar revenue ad businesses, we’re the fastest growing. There’s no other billion-dollar ad business that’s growing at close to 100%. And we feel like we’re just getting started,” said Bain.

Some Twitter users have been worrying that the company’s burgeoning advertising business will inevitably make the service worse for them, as it inserts more ads into their news feeds. Bain was keen to defend the company on this point.

“Amazing companies build out products to change and touch the world, and that’s certainly been the storyline for Twitter,” he said, before claiming that Twitter has managed to avoid the intrusive advertising that some users had feared.

“We could have done what everybody else had done, which was to bring banners or an interruptive ad experience to the platform,” he said.

“The advantage of the monetisation experience is the ads look, act and feel just like the organic content. You can do all the things to a promoted tweet that you can do to an organic tweet.”

Twitter is a public company now, however, with investors keen to see its revenues continue to grow rapidly. Bain denied that there is a “tension” within Twitter’s business, as it tries to keep users happy while continuing to increase its ad revenues.

“It would be a great storyline if that tension was there but in truth it’s not there in the business,” he said, before suggesting that brands are having to adapt to Twitter, rather than the other way around.

“There’s an economic advantage on Twitter for advertisers to be good, instead of just loud like we’ve trained them in the past however many years in display [advertising].”

Bain talked up Twitter’s MoPub mobile advertising business, which is now selling ads beyond Twitter. “MoPub sees a billion iOS and Android users every 30 days, so just massive scale,” he said.

Twitter is keen to get more companies buying its data beyond the deep-fat fryer market, too, with IBM recently striking a deal to offer access to the firehose of 500 million tweets a day through its business tools and consulting services.

“We think there’s a massive set of insights for businesses in Twitter data,” said Bain, citing hedge funds using the data to influence their trading, and health companies tracking disease outbreaks as they spread across the world as examples.

“It’s about a billion tweets sent every two days, so tens of billions each month, and hundreds of billion each year,” he said. “We think it’s the largest set of public conversations that are out there. And there are businesses that use the data in the most interesting ways.”

Twitter’s third line of business is commerce, with its new “buy” button having launched as a beta in September. Bain warned that it’s “a very early experiment” that the company hopes will become a significant part of its business.

“If you’re tweeting about a product or service, that button shows up and with one click, essentially, you can purchase a product. It’s early days,” he said.

“We’re experimenting with different price points with different products, and more importantly what emotions you need to generate as a business to get someone to buy in the moment… We’re trying to prove to those marketers that we can actually move transactions, and once that’s in place, a variety of business models come into play.”

Twitter users concerned about the company’s future direction may be wary of the way Bain sees their emotions as the driver for Twitter to make money, though.

“You get into a different mode as a user of Twitter. You get transported almost to this different place mentally. You get into this mode of ‘What’s hot? What’s new? What’s going on in the world? Or what’s happening in my world?’” he said.

“And for monetisation, all we do is monetise emotions. Those four emotions: what’s hot, what’s new, what’s going on in the world and what’s happening in my world.”

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