Twitter Nabs A Longtime Facebooker And Yelp's First Salesperson To Drive Ad Sales

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Monday, August 9th, 2010

We’re planning to ramp up the advertising platform,” Twitter writes in an email today. That shouldn’t be too surprising, but they’re also announcing some key hires in order to make that happen.

Dan Coughlin is joining Twitter from Facebook, where he spent the past four years. He will be the new director of sales for the Eastern (U.S.) region. Meanwhile, Amanda Levy is joining Twitter from Yelp, where she spent the past five years. She’ll be the new director of sales for the West (U.S.) region.

Coughlin was previously the director of media sales at Facebook, and before that did the same work for Yahoo for five years. He’s also worked at MarketWatch and DoubleClick. Levy oversaw West Coast sales for Yelp — and she was actually their first salesperson (and 10th overall hire). By the time she left, she was managing a team of 100 people, Twitter says.

Obviously, both seem to be pretty impressive hires for Twitter. AdAge got a bit more information about what their specific roles will be. Notably, both will be reporting directly to COO Dick Costolo and will be working on building out the “Twitter Promoted Products” area of the service — the area consisting of Promoted Tweets and Trends. But more interesting may be what Twitter is planning besides those two products in terms of advertising. The service has made it clear that they’re open to all kinds of experimentation in a bid to make money. One of those is their Earlybird Offers.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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Company: Yelp
Website: yelp.com
Launch Date: July 1, 2004
IPO: February 3, 2012, NYSE:YELP

Yelp (NYSE: YELP) connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metros across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Poland and Turkey. Yelp had a monthly average of 86 million unique visitors in Q4 2012*. By the end of Q4 2012, Yelpers had written more than 36 million rich,...

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