September 22, 2013
Twitter vs. Pandora Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting. Although “tweets” are only 140-characters text message you can still learn a lot real quick. The basic idea of Twitter was to marry short text messaging on cell phones with the Web and its ability to create social groups. (e-commerce, 2012). Twitter was founded in San Francisco, but it's used by people in nearly every country in the world. The service is available in more than 20 languages, and more are continuing to be added. (https://twitter.com/about). In 2010, Twitter produced only $45 million in revenue and zero profits despite over $360 million in funding since its inception. (e-commerce, 2012). So how has Twitter made money? Advertising is one way. Promoted Tweets are Twitter’s version of Google’s text ads. Twitter users can search for certain products and other company’s advertisements pop-up for a place to buy that particular product. Twitter also uses Promoted Trends to make money. This section informs users of what’s hot, what a lot of other people are talking about. Yet another monetizing service is temporal real-time search. Twitter has made agreements with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to permit these search engines to index tweets and make them available to the entire internet. (e-commerce, 2012). Pandora has a single mission, to play only music you love! Pandora’s team of musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every track - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics and more! This work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country. (http://www.pandora.com/about). In 2011, Pandora had over 80 million registered users and continues to add about 600,000 new subscribers a week—that’s one new subscriber about every second. How has Pandora become so successful? The biggest challenge was how to make a business out of a totally new kind of online radio station when competing online stations were making music available for free and most without advertising. (e-commerce, 2012).
Pandora offers 40 hours
