Is Twitter too late to make money from social media?

12:30 14th January 2010

Twitter could have waited too long to make money from social media.

That is the opinion of Social Media Explorer's Jason Falls, who warns that the micro-blogging site has been going too long to now build a profitable business model.

He said: "Having an app store and making developers pay for access to the API might be one idea, but they've let so many apps develop with no money exchanging hands."

By creating a user community that is free and open, Twitter has made it more difficult to start to make money, Mr Falls added.

Twitter is currently recruiting specialist staff in an attempt to find a way to make money from its service.

Other social media websites such as Facebook make their money from advertisements, but Twitter does not carry ads.

Data collected by Nielsen showed Twitter's traffic fell by 27.8 per cent from September to October last year.

The latest figures from web analyst Quantcast say 23.6 million people used Twitter in December compared to its peak of 29.2 million users in July.

Chief executive Evan Williams denied that there had been a drop off in usage of the social media site.

In a tweet on Tuesday, he said: "Across all metrics that matter, yesterday was Twitter's highest-usage day ever. And today will be bigger."