Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: The Full Dive Into Media Interview (Video)

Last week, we got to talk a deep roster of old and new media heavy hitters at D: Dive Into Media. Now we’re bringing you the full interviews from that conference, kicking off with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Costolo and I started out by talking about Twitter’s recent dustup with Google, but we jumped around a lot, touching on everything from Twitter’s deep integration with Apple to its response to government censorship.

The core of the interview, though, focused on Twitter’s evolution as a business and its relationship with media companies, who use the service to promote their products. (See: Yesterday’s Super Bowl.)

I think it’s quite obvious that Twitter itself is a media business — it attracts its users’ attention, then rents that attention out to advertisers.

Costolo says that advertising will be Twitter’s core revenue driver, but he disagreed with my assessment: “We’re in the media business, but we’re not necessarily a media company,” he said. It wasn’t the only time Costolo disagreed with something I said that night:

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I’m a giant vat of creative juices.

— David Pogue on why he’s joining Yahoo