Twitter rose from the ashes of a failed startup called Odeo to go on to become the #1 platform for discovery and become widely recognized as the SMS of the Internet with 300 million monthly active users as of 2019. However, Twitter has had quite a controversial start with the real history of Twitter having a fourth co-founder who was fired and not given the credit he deserves, as per the story revealed by Business Insider. Let’s probe into Twitter’s true founding history first and then examine how it makes money. Twitter’s Founding Story Before Twitter was born, Evan Williams, one of its founders was flush with money...

With its mission to help bring creative projects to life, Kickstarter helps finance creativity and innovation not just for art world elites but also for people that do not have a creative background, facilitating projects in various categories such as Art, Design, Journalism, Photography, and Theater. Every Kickstarter project has a clear goal such as making an album or a book and the project creator keeps 100% ownership of their work. Since its launch in 2009, 18 million people have pledged over $4.9 billion to fund more than 180,000 Kickstarter projects. But how exactly does Kickstarter work and make money?  Let's find out, but...

If we were to ask a random group of people to list down the search engines that they’ve used, most would say Google. A few of them, particularly millennials, might even say Bing or Yahoo.  And that’s because Google has had more than 90% market share among search engines for almost two decades now. Even in Dec 2009, when Christian Kroll, founder of Ecosia decided to launch the eco-friendly search engine, Google had more than 90% market share.  So why did he even bother starting another search engine? Well, his desire to build a business that would have a positive social impact on the...

In 2018, US consumers spent more money on Airbnb than they did on the hotel industry giant Hilton and its subsidiary brands, according to a report by second measure, a company that analyses anonymized debit and credit card purchases. The only company to have made more revenue than Airbnb was Mariott, the world’s largest hotel company, which saw a steep rise in revenue after acquiring Starwood Hotel in 2016.  Source: Second Measure In terms of consumer lodging US market share, Airbnb owns 20 percent of the market, which in itself is huge considering Airbnb is an upstart relative to the established hotel brand...

The earliest medium of spreading news & information at a massive scale was the printed newspaper, which was first published weekly in Germany from 1609. In their early days, newspapers were expensive because they were sold directly to consumers -- without ad-based models to support them.  All that changed in 1833 when a news publisher named Benjamin Day invented the now ubiquitous advertising supported publishing model, changing the economics of the newspaper business, for better or for worse. A newspaper that cost 6 cents per issue, an expensive price at the time, now sold for a penny per issue, supported by the advertising...