Think about all of the paywalled news outlets out there. Think about how many journalists tweet their stories to drive their personal brand. Think about immensely popular twitter accounts and sought after domain experts. Think about the fact that someone who is very entertaining on twitter needs to leave twitter to ( consult, sell t-shirts, produce media, etc. ) if they want to make money. Think about how t.co makes it possible for them to track url usage attributable to them.

Remember when micropayments for media was a buzzword?

If you still don't get why twitter might be undervalued. I would be happy to to explain it to you with, charts, graphs and a full research report; for a fee.

If a million people use a link to go to a paywall site, that's awesome - except as of now the data shows that Twitter users don't become buyers as a general rule.

Can they make money? Sure. Can they make money with ads? Sure. Can they make money with massive vertical media funnels? Well...what will make them more successful than Apple, Google, Microsoft and TimeWarner who have all been trying to do the same exact thing for many years?

Not saying they won't...just saying I'd like to see some track record before I buy into an idea that no one has been able to make work yet.

Err.. I'm not sure about Apple or TimeWarner, but Google and Microsoft have been very successful at making display advertising work well.

Check out the IAB 2013 Half Yearly report[1]. Some key quotes:

Display-related advertising accounted for $3.1 billion or 30% of total revenues during Q2 2013, up 8% from the $2.9 billion (33% of total) reported in Q2 2012. Q2 2013 Display-related advertising includes Display/Banner Ads (19% of revenues, or $1.9 billion), Rich Media (3% or $329 million), Digital Video (7% or $676 million), and Sponsorship (2% or $181 million).

Note that they aren't counting mobile advertising as display advertising (even though much of it effectively is).

Mobile revenues continued to quickly gain share, representing 15% of total revenues in HY 2013, as compared with 9% reported in FY 2012 and 5% in FY 2011. First half 2013 Mobile revenues represent 90% of total 2012 Mobile revenues.

Note that Twitter has particularly strong mobile usage.

Many people don't realize that people still pay a lot for "eyeballs":

At 65% of advertising revenues through half-year 2013, performance-based pricing appears to have leveled off, even experiencing a slight decline from its high of 66% for the full year 2012. As a result, CPM/impression-based pricing gained slightly, up to 33% for the half-year, its highest point since 2010.

[1] http://www.iab.net/media/file/IABInternetAdvertisingRevenueR...

their demographic targeting is razor sharp, you can target followers of specific users, or people within any of the standard demographics. You can also target people by specific interests.

I think this is the AdWords for branding

I think there's a big opportunity for twitter to be middleman allowing authors to charge for their services. Twitter influencers might get articles for free publicity. But most people would pay to twitter to pay authors proportionately; and if you logged in with twitter on any news site; it's covered.

If I could pay 1 outfit and have it distributed fairly to everyone whose stuff I read... So that I don't have to get a subscription to all of [ nytimes, latimes, chronicle, guardian, bloomberg, j.random.techblogger etc. ] But never got paywalled and knew the authors were getting paid; I would find that a compelling offering. Now Amazon could probably make a play for that position, but they have some structural issues that limit them and twitter has a better story for independents.

Many investors appreciate a blurrier future since it can lead to more upside.

Advertising online is, I believe, in the long run, going to be tricky to maintain as a source of income, even for content-centric sites. For service-oriented sites, such as twitter, I just don't think it's the right approach, especially given a nice API which allows the ads to be bypassed. OK, I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but it would be really nice for a high profile social network to just try this and see if they can make it work (I know linkedin's model is essentially this, but I see them as a very different beast from the general interest communication juggernaut that is twitter).