$1 Billion for Your Thoughts on Twitter: Today's Outrage
NEW YORK (
) -- Twitter is rewriting that old saying about a penny for your thoughts. It turns out that our most mundane and irrelevant musings are worth $1 billion.
That's the value placed on Twitter after a new round of funding that will infuse $100 million into the social media, micro-blogging Internet revolutionizing business with pretty much no real sources of revenue, according to
in the
New York Times
(NYT) - Get Report
.
The new money is coming from
Insight Venture Partners
,
T. Rowe Price
(TROW) - Get Report
, and Twitter's existing backers
Spark Capital
and
Institutional Venture Partners
, who according to the
New York Times,
may be emboldened in their investment by reports that the likes of
Microsoft
(MSFT) - Get Report
,
(GOOG) - Get Report
and
have all expressed interest in buying Twitter.
They are betting that there is a way to monetize the millions of tweeters who share their sundry thoughts in 140 characters or less throughout each day.
There is no disputing that Twitter and the new Twitterati are a phenomenon. I'm tweating this very post to
TheStreet also tweets throughout the day at
I can understand the excitement since Twitter burst on the scene and became a big hit so fast. It reminds me of
YouTube
, which Google infamously bought for $1.65 billion in 2006.
Oh wait, Google still hasn't figured out how to make good coin from user-generated videos.
Will Twitter be different?
That's the billion-dollar question.
Let's tweet about it.
--Written by Glenn Hall in New York.
Glenn Hall is the New York-based Editor in Chief of
TheStreet.com
. Previously, he served as deputy editor and chief innovation officer at
The Orange County Register
and as a news manager at
Bloomberg News
in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Washington, D.C. As a reporter, he covered business and financial markets, worked in both print and television in the U.S. and Europe, and conducted in-depth investigative coverage at
The Journal-Gazette
in Fort Wayne, Ind. His work also has been published in a variety of newspapers including
The Wall Street Journal
,
The New York Times
and
International Herald Tribune
. Hall received a bachelor's degree in journalism and political science from The Ohio State University and a certificate in project and program management from Boston University.
