Twitter stock market papers reveal sale of users’ data
Twitter’s legal papers filed ahead of its stock market flotation have revealed that the social network earned $47.5 million from the sale of data to companies that analyse it for marketing insights.
Estimates place the value of data mining at $17 billion
“The site's constant stream of experiences, opinions and sentiments has spawned a vast commercial ecosystem, serving up putative insights to product developers, Hollywood studios, major retailers and - potentially most profitably - hedge funds and other investors,” the Australain newspaper commented.
It added that the data was fed to “hundreds of social listening firms” which have arisen in response to the data stream.
“Most of the social companies pull data from a range of sources, including Yahoo's Tumblr, Facebook
“But Twitter, because of its public real-time data stream, is the industry giant. Even the Library of Congress is now cataloging tweets.”
The 'big data' market is projected to be worth $16.9 billion within two years.
Twitter declined to comment.