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: