Twitter CEO Dorsey: We'll Figure Out A Business Model Later

The eternal question: Twitter is popular, but how is it ever going to be a business? IWantMedia's Patrick Phillips recently checked in with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Among the learnings: Dorsey ditched his nose ring before he tried to raise funding, corporations are using Twitter more and more, and while Twitter is a cool tool for journalists like CNN's Rick Sanchez, it definitely won't replace newspapers or bloggers (whew!). "We will always need a medium that carries more words and explores a topic in greater detail," he said.

On the key question, however, Dorsey is keeping it vague:

IWM: How will Twitter make money?

Dorsey: Twitter has potential for different monetization paths. We think the best one is something that emerges organically. We listen to how people use Twitter and establish patterns around that. By considering that we can make those patterns more convenient and potentially charge for those.

We have noticed that Twitter has a lot of commercial usage. That's very interesting to us. Twitter has a lot of people asking questions, which is also very interesting. Twitter also has a lot of people providing answers, some of which are commercially driven. So these are all things that we take into consideration.

But we don't want to force any particular model onto the user base until we feel comfortable doing that. We don't want to do it too soon -- and we definitely don't want to do it too late. But the time is not right now.

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