Twitter is not a media company. Twitter is not a media company. Twitter is not a media company.
Nope. Twitter Still Isn’t a Media Company. Just Ask Katie Jacobs Stanton.
Twitter’s media boss explains why actual media companies don’t feel threatened by the service.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Twitter executives, from CEO Dick Costolo on down, are quite clear about the fact that they’re not running a media company. They have been saying so for years.
But there are still slowpokes like me who have yet to catch on. We notice that Twitter makes money — more than $1 billion this year — selling advertising, just like a media company. And that Twitter aggregates, curates and distributes all kinds of information, just like a media company. And that Twitter keeps developing new ways to host … well, there’s no other way to say it — media.
Hence our confusion. But Katie Jacobs Stanton, the Twitter executive tasked with working with actual media companies, says we should figure it out. After all, she notes, Twitter has many media partners, from TV networks to bloggers, eager to use its service. And if those companies thought Twitter was a competitor, they wouldn’t be.
Stanton laid this out for me last week at our Code/Media event in San Francisco, and was quite patient about it. She also took the time to explain Twitter’s “concentric circles” user-base metaphor, which seems to confuse Wall Street, as well as the company’s current thinking about television. (Spoiler: Twitter loves TV!)
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
