Twitter hires former Ticketmaster chief Hubbard

Twitter has hired Nathan Hubbard, the ex 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. He 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 $1bn (€747m) in 2014 sales. In its first foray into e-commerce, projected by Forrester Research to be a $370bn market in the US by 2017, Twitter plans to offer retailers tools for selling goods and services inside tweets, Mr Hubbard said.

“We’re going to go to people who have stuff to sell and help them use Twitter to sell it more effectively.”

Mr Hubbard will look to team up with merchants and providers of payment services rather than compete with them, and may take a percentage of any transactions on its site.

“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.

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 $582.8m in ad sales this year, according to EMarketer.