Search and you shall find… real-time tweets on Google. Again. Bloomberg reports that Twitter and Google have revived an agreement the two companies had from 2009 to 2011. Google again has direct access to Twitter s stream, and tweets will reach more people.
Expanding the reach of tweets is key for Twitter. The San Francisco company has 284 million monthly active users, but it s facing questions about user growth. News of the Twitter-Google deal comes on the heels of Twitter s announcement earlier this week of new ad partnerships: Promoted Tweets will soon appear on Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. So that s two developments in one week that jibes with what the Wall Street Journal points out is Twitter s goal to build the world s largest daily audience, regardless of whether that audience uses Twitter. Did we mention that Twitter is set to release its earnings report later today?
As for Google, it will now have access to what search engines Yahoo and Bing have had because of their deals with Twitter, and will no longer have to crawl Twitter s site for tweets.
Bloomberg cites an unnamed source who says the agreement involves no ad revenue. That suggests Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, which was $41 million in the third quarter, up from $16 million a year earlier, according to the article. Chris O Brien, writing for VentureBeat, points out that Google would effectively be paying Twitter for content. Paying for content is something Google has fought against for years. (Just a couple of months ago, Google shut down Google News in Spain after Spanish publishers demanded payment for showing snippets of their content, a move the publishers later came to regret.)
Bloomberg says real-time tweets will begin showing up in Google search results in the first half of this year. Neither Google nor Twitter confirmed the deal.
Photo from Bay Area News Group archives
