Dick Costolo
Job: chief executive, Twitter
Age: 48
Industry: digital media
New entry
Dick Costolo was previously Twitter's chief operating officer, and took over from Evan Williams when the latter was on paternity leave in what was expected to be a brief sojourn; it hasn't turned out that way. The ex-Googler has shown a growing focus on making the social networking service, which now has more than 500 million active users worldwide every month, into something properly profitable. To that end he has experimented with ideas such as "promoted tweets", "promoted trends" and "earlybird specials", all aiming to make Twitter more of a vehicle for commercial content than it has been in the past.
The latest scheme, announced at the end of August, is to slash prices on ads inserted into Twitter feeds ("promoted tweets") from 30p to 1p and let advertisers target users directly based on its reading of their interests, based on who they follow. Advertisers will be able to send tweets to appear in people's "timelines" (of tweets from those they follow) – so a football fan might see a link or tweet about sports clothing.
Costolo's measures have annoyed third-party developers in particular, who have seen the company become more and more protective of its gigantic database of 140-character insights, which grows by another 340m every day. They have complained about restrictions on use that Costolo is implementing, putting a ceiling on the number of users that third-party apps which simply display tweets can have without getting special permission. Twitter has been using a mixture of carrot and stick to push third-party developers away from essentially copying Twitter's own apps; the developers are resisting hard.
But Costolo, driving Twitter in search of more revenue, is unafraid to break some eggs to make a profitable omelette. For 2011 it generated $139.5m in revenues; the aim is to increase that to as much as $300m this year. Whether that will make it profitable is unknown, but with about $1bn of venture capital already sunk into the six-year-old company, it's becoming urgent.
Twitter's position as a conduit for content, rather than a creator (as Google is becoming) means that it is favourably viewed by the media industries. News organisations note its power for breaking stories; others, its ability to build (and sometimes tear down) brands. It blocks links to pirate sites (often invisibly), while its role as an injunction-breaker has delighted more than a few newspapers and dissidents. But Costolo doesn't highlight any of those roles; the company's mission statement is "to instantly connect people everywhere to what's most important to them". (Google's, by contrast, is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".)
Unlike Google, Twitter didn't take part in any demonstrations over the US Stop Online Piracy Act in January; Costolo said that Wikipedia's blackout on the day was "just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."