Indonesia is one of Twitter’s fastest-growing markets, according to company CEO Evan Williams.
While the growth of the popular microbogging site has slowed in the US, Evans said India, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil are making up the difference.
Despite widespread speculation about Twitter’s profit potential, Evans insisted the company is still focusing on improving the product rather than finding ways to make money.
“The irresponsible thing to do would be to take our eye off that and focus on revenue,” he said today at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. “It’s not like we’re spending our days looking in the couch cushions for a revenue model.”
Twitter, which lets people share 140-character messages online, has yet to make significant money from its millions of users. The San Francisco-based company had 20.9 million users in September, up about 18-fold from a year earlier, according to ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia.
Twitter attracted about $100 million in venture capital funding last month, valuing the company at $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The company is considering generating revenue by having advertisements on the site and giving marketers deeper access to its data, Williams said.
Companies are already using Twitter to interact with customers and distribute financial information.
“There’s a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today,” Williams said. “If we’re driving a lot of value for businesses, I’m not too worried about extracting some of that value for ourselves.”
Williams also said he doesn’t regret turning down an offer by Facebook Inc. to buy the company last year.
“Ultimately I didn’t see a reason to sell,” he said. “That’s not the point. The point is to see what we can build. It doesn’t get more interesting by being part of a bigger company.”