Revealed: How Twitter plans to make $140m by 2010

According to stolen documents published by TechCrunch, Twitter's long-awaited money-making strategy focuses on verified accounts, search ads, sponsored tweets, AdSense widgets and payments.

Verified accounts, described by Twitter as ‘the fastest way to make money without putting the whole organisation behind it', would see corporate and celebrity users charged for their Twitter accounts. Facebook currently operates a similar model, requiring advertisers to pay to create Fan Pages, as opposed to setting up a profile.

Search ads would see heavy users of Twitter's search API required to run ads on the service. According to the leaked documents, Twitter will invest in engineering to make the offering ‘flawless' and ‘timely'.

The thirds prong of the strategy focuses on generating revenue via sponsored tweets that could see advertisers charged for targeting consumers with direct messages offering coupons and discount vouchers.

Twitter's commercial strategy also includes AdSense widgets. The microblog's founders have said little of this in the past, but they could take the form of Twitter ads that run on third-party sites and in other apps like Google's AdSense.

There is little information in the stolen documents about payments, the final prong of Twitter's ambitious money-making plan.

Twitter has seen the internet flooded with 310 of its most confidential documents including partner agreements, financial projections and security passcodes after it fell foul of hackers. Click here for six of the juiciest snippets from the company's secret files.

This article was first published on revolutionmagazine.com