Twitter is stepping up its efforts to make itself profitable by beginning the process of recruiting a number of staff whose main focus will be to generate income for the microblogging service.
Twitter’s website says it is looking “for new members of our technical staff to work on cutting edge monetization projects”.
Four jobs have been advertised on Twitter’s website directly relating to generating cash including product marketing manager for monetization as well as three software and systems engineering roles.
Several other business development jobs advertised also have revenue generating responsibilities attached to them, according to advertising journal Brand Republic.
One of the jobs advertised, for a front-end engineer, monetization, includes implementing front-end features for “monetization systems, including customer applications and reporting”.
Reuters quotes a source close to Twitter who said: “The company has crossed into the phase where monetisation matters. They’re ramping it up.”
Twitter founder Biz Stone said in November that his company was planning to launch paid-for commercial accounts for corporate users, which offered them additional services.
To date Twitter has spent more money than it has generated as it has built up its business to attract more than 40 million users from just a few million a year earlier.
Those additional users have helped drive Twitter’s US traffic to 19.4 million unique visitors in November, according to comScore.
Twitter has raised more than $155million from venture capitalists giving it a valuation of around $1bn, but until late last year had generated very little revenue in its two-and-a-half-year history. In October it struck deals with Google and Microsoft, which were reported to be worth $15million and $10million respectively, licensing them its data feed to use it in their real-time search results.
In November 2009 when Stone talked about how Twitter would generate cash in the coming year he cited licensing and syndication as areas it would be looking at. The two business development roles advertised both include a remit to “set up and strike smart, productive licensing deals”.
Another area that could bring cash generating possibilities is that of media partnerships.
Media organisations have been some of the biggest adopters of Twitter with accounts such as @cnnbrk and @breakingnews attracting in excess of 2.8 million and 1.5 million followers respectively.