Private markets a 'distraction': Twitter CEO

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo called secondary markets a distraction and expects private companies will increasingly enact policies to restrict the trading of its shares on those unregulated exchanges.

Microblogging service Twitter, along with fellow red-hot social media companies Zynga and Facebook, have already had to put in place "lots of policies to constrain that," Costolo told the audience at a Fortune conference in Aspen, Colorado.

In December, an investment led by venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins valued the company at $4 billion. Since then, an $80 million investment by Andreessen Horowitz in February on the private markets valued Twitter at $4 billion, and recent transactions have accorded the company a price tag of as much as $7 billion.

Looking at options to broaden revenue streams

Costolo also indicated Twitter was looking at options to broaden its revenue streams beyond advertising, singling out taking a cut of any goods sold via the microblogging service as a prospect. But he stopped short of offering specifics.

"There's a commerce opportunity to take advantage of if we want," he said. "We already see a tremendous amount of commerce on the platform."

As examples, he cited the San Diego Chargers using Twitter to sell tickets last year for a game that otherwise might not have reached the audience threshold for television broadcast, and Google selling tickets to a developers' conference.

Noting that customers now typically need to go to a third-party website to buy offers, he said: "The way you would think about it is, 'how can we remove friction from the process?'"

Asked about Google+, the social network launched late last month by the world's largest Internet search engine, Costolo said he believed Google would "leverage their tremendous reach to pull people into the experience."