Twitter Japan Tweeting All the Way to the Bank

Twitter’s Japanese arm may well be on its way to turning a profit next year the old-fashioned way: through ad sales.

Digital Garage Inc., the Tokyo-based technology company that provides Twitter to millions of Japanese chirpers, said the revenue of its newly restructured social-media unit is expected to more than double to 1.7 billion yen through June 2011, according to its revised midterm business plan. Twitter makes up more than half of that segment’s business, a Digital Garage spokeswoman said.

The company revamped the segment, called the “media incubation unit,” this year to focus on Twitter. It has generated some 200 million yen in ad sales in the first six months since it launched its advertising service in December, according to its annual financial report.

As of April, the logos of 82 Japanese companies, including Nissan, Panasonic and Sharp, appear in the ad slot of the Japanese-language Twitter site. The growing number of eyeballs skimming ads from Sony (SNE), mobile service Au and others will likely throw more dollars Digital Garage’s way.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »