Twitter looks to increase data sales

According to a story in the Guardian, Moody — former CEO of analytics company Gnip, which Twitter acquired in April last year for $130m — is looking to market Twitter’s firehose to companies such as IBM, Oracle and Salesforce.com, as well as marketing specialists like Klout, who will repackage the data to sell on to other companies.

In 2014, sales from tweets amounted to $70m, a small proportion of Twitter’s overall revenues of $1.3bn. Moody wants to increase this by matching its users to a company’s database of customers to provide targeted advertising.

Moody insists that this strategy is uncontroversial with regard to data privacy, acknowledging that one of the questions the company often gets asked is: “How do we ensure that we are not being creepy?”

“You bring your data to us and we will ensure that your customers, if they exist on Twitter – we can provide advertisements to them,” he says. “It’s done in a completely anonymised fashion, so we are not sharing private information.”