“Twitter’s data business has rippled across the economy…serving up putative insights to product developers, Hollywood studios, major retailers and—potentially most profitably—hedge funds and other investors.”
— “Twitter’s Data Business Proves Lucrative,” The Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2013.
It’s not the $47.5 million in revenue to Twitter that’s the prize — it’s what brands can do with the data to create business outcomes. For example, earlier this year one tweet caused a $136.5 billion market drop while another drove oil prices higher. Twitter is moving to capture market value for itself but it has already been creating value for many others at a larger scale.