Google, Bing deals make Twitter profitable: BusinessWeek

Twitter has reached profitability after signing deals with Google and Microsoft to make the micro-blogging service searchable on the Internet, BusinessWeek magazine reported on Monday.

BusinessWeek, which was purchased in October by financial news agency Bloomberg, said Twitter had signed a 15-million-dollar data-mining deal with Google and a 10-million-dollar agreement with Microsoft.

"The deals were huge," Bloomberg BusinessWeek quoted an unidentified person "familiar with the company's finances" as saying. "With two scoops of the pen, a lot of revenue came in."

The magazine said the agreements to make Twitter messages known as "tweets" searchable by Google and Microsoft's new search engine Bing "carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009."

It said Twitter also achieved profitability by renegotiating deals with telecommunications companies to bring down costs.

Twitter has been working on ways to make money from its globally popular service, and revenue producing ideas mentioned to date include selling premium accounts that businesses could use for marketing or image building.

The San Francisco-based startup has won millions of users since the service that allows people to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages launched in August 2006.

(c) 2009 AFP