system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 - How does Twitter make money?

No ads?  Free accounts?  I don't get it.  Are they playing the very long game?
gpt
Companies pay for promoted trends and promoted tweets. Let's say Starbucks are releasing a new drink, and they want to promote it through Twitter. They will pay Twitter a certain amount of money to promote the trend, which means it will appear on the main page timeline. It's all advertising, except the user doesn't know it's advertising because there aren't text-ads all over the website.