Twitter is making money, says CEO

Twitter is to launch a crowd-sourced translation service and is already generating revenue, according to CEO Dick Costolo.

Speaking at his keynote during this year’s Mobile World Congress, Costolo said the new service will let users translate tweets originally made in foreign languages using crowdsourcing.

He was brief on how the translations will be facilitated but revealed the first languages to be offered via the service will be Turkish, Russian, Indonesian and Portuguese.

During the address he added that the company is “already making money”, adding that its ad service lets brands amplify the effectiveness of their normal Twitter activity.

Costolo also told attendees at the conference that 40% of all tweets come from mobile platforms and that over 50% of active Twitter users access the service from multiple devices.

“Growth is not an issue for us,” he said, adding that the site has grown from 100m tweets a day to 130m in the last few months.

Costolo also revealed that the social media site is growing in terms of new users, although not all of them are active tweeters.

“For years a lot of people have described us as a microblogging site but I think they’re missing the critical importance of the service,” he said. “Many of them are just there to consume content.”

Facebook’s translation tool was also crowdsourced from its users.

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk

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