Today, Twitter announced that it was acquiring Gnip, the Colorado based startup that provides access to the entire “firehose” of Twitter data to marketers and platforms.
By bringing Gnip into its fold, Twitter is taking ownership of a valuable commodity, its activity data. Gnip is one of the few companies granted access to the complete Twitter data firehose, and it delivers that data to social analytics platforms, agencies and other social media listening tools.
It’s almost surprising that it took this long for Twitter to take ownership over providing its own data, but maybe that’s because it’s taken this long for Twitter data to be validated as a useful commodity marketers are willing to pay money for. Before, it made sense for Twitter to provide its data to only a handful of resellers, such as Gnip and its competitors Datasift and Dataminr, since it saved them the trouble of having to field multiple requests for access to its data.
Now that the demand for Twitter data has been validated, acquiring Gnip gives Twitter an additional revenue stream. That’s something that’ll definitely be useful for the newly public company when it comes to answering to its investors.
In a blog post about the acquisition, Twitter VP Jana Messerschmidt says customers can expect even better integration and more in-depth analytics from Gnip, now that it’s developing under the Twitter name:
We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface. Together we plan to offer more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments, so that even more developers and businesses big and small around the world can drive innovation using the unique content that is shared on Twitter. We will continue making our data available to Gnip’s growing customer base. And with the help of Gnip’s Boulder-based team, we will be extending our data platform — through Gnip and our existing public APIs — even further.
