Twitter today acquired Gnip, a company that had access to Twitter's "firehose" of data and packaged it for resale to other companies that want to slice and dice it.
It's at least the fourth acquisition that Twitter has made in the data space, and few people have paid any attention to it. Everyone knows that Twitter is an advertising business, and ads make up nearly 90% of the company's revenue.
Twitter has actively played down the other side of its business, data licensing, warning investors in its SEC disclosures that it expects data payments to be a declining percentage of its overall revenue.
But when you look at Twitter's data revenue as a standalone business, you realize how healthy it is: In 2013, Twitter got $70 million in data licensing payments, up 48% from the year before. By the end of 2014, Twitter could easily see $100 million in data revenue if the segment continues growing at that rate.
Read Twitter's big data story here >
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