Social media darling, Twitter has become suddenly profitable. According to a report by Business Week earlier this morning, Twitter is ending 2009 with a bit of profit. 
Earlier this year Twitter struck arrangements with Google and Microsoft's Bing. Those agreements carried sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009 according to the report.
In exchange for making tweets searchable on Google and Bing, Twitter will receive about $15 million and $10 million respectivly. The popularity of Twitter among mobile users also helped Twitter. The company used to pay a lot of money to telecom companies for distributing millions of SMS messages over their wireless networks. Now that Twitter has become so popular, it has gained bargaining power with these companies and has managed to renegotiate many deals with carriers that the company pays far less for these services.
Many experts have predicted that Twitter will start charging businesses for corporate Twitter accounts. Others believe that Twitter will engage in a sort of advertising model. Whatever happens in 2010, one thing is for sure: profitablity (for Twitter) comes from focusing on creating an outstanding user experience and increasing your subscription base; Not by slashing staff and choking innovation.
According to the article, the goal at Twitter now is to add advertising without disrupting the way the service works, Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said last month at a conference."We want to do something that's organic and in the flow of the way people already use Twitter—and not: 'Here's the tweets and here are the ads.'"
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