Jack Dorsey
The move means Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s CEO and became chairman in 2008, will play a more hands-on role at the California -based provider of microblogging.
| BRIAN WOMACK and DOUGLAS MACMILLAN |
Published: 2011/03/30 07:26:06 AM |
TWITTER co-founder Jack Dorsey will become executive chairman and head of product development as the company aims to narrow Facebook ’s lead in online advertising and get users to be more active on its site.
The move means Mr Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s CEO and became chairman in 2008, will play a more hands-on role at the California -based provider of microblogging. He will also remain CEO of Square , the mobile-payments provider he co-founded in 2009.
Twitter needed Mr Dorsey, who helped build its blogging platform, to develop other products that persuade users to spend more time on the site, said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at EMarketer .
Twitter may generate less than 10% of the advertising sales of Facebook this year, her firm says, and its user base is expanding more slowly. "Twitter is recognising that it might have a product problem," Ms Williamson said.
"To be anywhere close to the success that Facebook has achieved, Twitter just needs to be used by more people on a more regular basis."
Advertising sales on Twitter may more than triple to about 150m this year, EMarketer says. It estimates Facebook brought in advertising revenue of 1,86b n last year.
Facebook had 151-million users in the US last month , up 35% from a year earlier, ComScore said. Twitter had 23-million , up 16%.
Users of Facebook, which was founded two years before Twitter, should account for 42% of the total US population this year, up from 38% last year, said EMarketer.
Twitter users should make up 8,7% of the country’s adult population this year, from 7% last year.
Twitter says it has more than 200-million registered accounts and is creating almost 500000 accounts a day. It took about 18 months to sign up the first 500000 accounts.
Still, a minority of users contribute an inordinately high percentage of the service’s messages, according to a study by researchers at Yahoo and Cornell University earlier this month. About 50% of the messages consumed on Twitter’s service are generated by 20000 users, the researchers found.
"Twitter is a platform that is dominated by a small group of power users," said Arnie Gullov-Singh, CEO of social media advertising startup Ad.ly . "The question is, how do you get more consumers creating more content? If you can get to 100- million unique (users) in the US, it would be a dominant media platform that no brand can ignore."
The company’s product development was likely to thrive under Mr Dorsey’s direction, said Robin Chan, who has invested in Twitter and Square. He compared Mr Dorsey’s role to that of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who founded animated film studio Pixar while running a different company. "This is Jack’s decade," Mr Chan said. "Not since Steve Jobs have we seen an entrepreneur innovate with two disruptive companies. Managing his time between both companies will be a challenge.
"Fortunately he is surrounded by great business leaders."
Square would remain Mr Dorsey’s "top priority", said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based company .
"As executive chairman, Jack will dive in to work with more than 450 people, led by an experienced executive team," Twitter said.
"Not only is Twitter experiencing record growth, but we also now have a new infrastructure that will keep us ahead of that growth and enable us to launch products that will make Twitter more instant, simple and always present."
Dick Costolo, who helped introduce a new advertising service for companies on Twitter last year, became CEO in October, replacing co-founder Evan Williams.
Twitter revamped its site in September with the aim of being faster, easier to use and better able to handle photos and videos. The service features a second column that lets users quickly look at messages without leaving a page . Bloomberg
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