Twitter Hires First Commerce Chief For Social Shopping Push

August 28, 2013

Twitter hired Nathan Hubbard, the former president of Ticketmaster, as its first head of commerce, part of a push to enable shopping via short postings on its social website.
Mr. Hubbard, 38, started at San Francisco-based Twitter this week, said Jim Prosser, a spokesman for the online social service. As commerce chief, Mr. Hubbard will report to Adam Bain, Twitter’s head of global revenue. Mr. Hubbard left Live Nation Entertainment’s Ticketmaster unit earlier this month amid an overhaul of its online services.
Twitter is seeking new sources of revenue as it prepares for a potential initial public offering and targets $1 billion in 2014 sales. In its first foray into e-commerce, projected by Forrester Research to be a $370 billion market in the U.S. by 2017, Twitter plans to offer retailers tools for selling goods and services inside tweets, Hubbard said in an interview.
“We’re going to go to people who have stuff to sell and help them use Twitter to sell it more effectively,” Mr. Hubbard said.
Mr. Hubbard will look to team up with merchants and providers of payment services rather than compete with those companies, and may take a percentage of any transactions on its site, he said.
“One of the hallmarks of Twitter’s entire approach has been partnering,” he said. “We’re going to take the same approach with owners of physical and digital goods.”
Mr. Hubbard, a Princeton University graduate with a masters in business administration from Stanford University, was formerly a touring and recording artist, and has released five albums.
Online shopping
By enabling shopping via Twitter’s site and mobile applications, the company is seeking to keep users on the site for longer and to learn more about their interests. Data about online-shopping habits would be valuable to advertisers, who contribute the bulk of Twitter’s estimated $582.8 million in ad sales this year, according to EMarketer Inc.
Earlier this month, Twitter said it’s working with research firm Datalogix to track when advertisements on the site, called Promoted Tweets, lead to purchases in brick-and-mortar stores.
While Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo has said that management isn’t concentrating on an IPO, the company is widely predicted to hold a share sale before long to help it bankroll expansion, and give early investors a way to realize financial gains on their holdings.
The CEO has bolstered his management team, promoting Ali Rowghani to chief operating officer, adding finance veteran Mike Gupta and hiring former Morgan Stanley executive Cynthia Gaylor to run corporate development.
At Ticketmaster, Mr. Hubbard had been overseeing a $75 million overhaul of the unit’s online technology to make the service easier to use for consumers and venue owners. He joined Live Nation in after the concert promoter bought a majority of Musictoday, an online merchandising company where Mr. Hubbard was CEO.
— Bloomberg News —