Wall Street Is Giving Up On Twitter

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-02-10/wall-street-is-giving-up-on-revenue-challenged-twitter

by petethomas • 9 years ago

182 227 9 years ago

Here's something from a heavy Twitter user that could save Twitter:

1) Offer ad freedom. Twitter has IIRC 300M users - if only 10% of these pay 1€ a month, that's 30M a month or 360M a year. Way more than enough to keep the lights on, and maybe even enough to replace lost ad revenue.

2) Open up the app ecosystem again - allow third party clients features like DM pictures and polls. Many people are fed up with the official mobile client.

3) Donald J. Trump. About 25M people follow him, and ad slots on his account should fetch a boatload of money. Not to mention that people sign up for Twitter just to read his latest brain f.rts... these could all be "upconverted" to full-on engaging Twitter users.

maherbeg• 9 years ago

They really do need to do this. Any embedded tweets for Trump/about Trump should automatically have an ad underneath them. They've never had more eye balls on their tweets than now and they should capitalize on that.

actuator2• 9 years ago

Regarding your first point. 360M is about half of their quarterly revenue. If they aren't able to survive with that amount, how would they survive with 360M a year.

gschier• 9 years ago

Getting 10% of users to pay would be extremely unlikely, though. I think a more realistic number would be closer to 0.5%.

ar0• 9 years ago

I doubt that 10% of Twitter users would pay 1 EUR / month (=> 12 EUR / year!) for an ad-free experience.

Here is one survey I found, which states that ~10% of people said they would pay at least 10$ / year for ad-free Facebook: http://marketingland.com/survey-ten-percent-would-pay-at-lea...

Surveys greatly overstate such figures because it is much easier to say "yes I want to pay" than to actually hand over money. Also, I would argue that Facebook is more important for most users than Twitter (their central problem).

actuator2• 9 years ago

and therein lies the problem, 10% of Facebook's MAU is 180 million, that nets them 1.8 billion a year. They made 9 billion dollars last quarter. It doesn't make sense for them to switch to $10 a year.

Even if they show ads to remaining users, most of the paying users are going to end up being avid users of the service who are probably more valuable for ads.

problems2• 9 years ago

In reality most people who want "ad free" anything will just install an ad blocker - it's free.

hobo_mark• 9 years ago

I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.

Note this is not the client filtering them out (they'd be banned in an instant) it's just that the API only returns what's actually in my timeline.

Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.

mschuster912• 9 years ago

I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.

Huh? On Android I have three accounts and at least that works fine (given various exceptions, but generally it's OK). Not sure about iPhone client.

Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.

TweetDeck is a horrible mess for multiple accounts, from a UX perspective...

simplicio• 9 years ago

Twitters yearly revenue is more than 2 billion. So 360 million wouldn't solve their problem.

Twitters problem isn't that they don't make money. They make a lot of money. Their problem is that their stock-valuation means that in the future their investors expect them to make ridiculous amounts of money, and they don't have any obvious way to get there.

jessaustin2• 9 years ago

Trying to profit on the backs of regular users won't work for Twitter. Charging a regular fee, loading up on enough ads to keep investors happy, or anything else like that is a quick way to lose a bunch of users. Instead, Twitter need to think like Google or any other ad network. They should charge those who make money by tweeting. The industrial tweeters, the people flogging their sites or albums or hair products or whatever. If you've ever hired a social media consultant, Twitter should be charging you thousands of dollars a year. I'm sure there's some level of "tweets read per week" that would catch Kim K while sparing most high school tech bloggers.

Karunamon3• 9 years ago

HN folks, does every post about Twitter need to be made about the president? The unwarranted injection of politics into every single discussion is getting very, very tiring.

The article didn't mention him. He's not even in the top 25 most followed or active people on the site. Obama had more influence as #3! And yet, as I write this, every single comment in this damn thread mentions him. [1] Enough already! This is the first time I've wanted to flag an article for its comment section rather than the article itself.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/cHEV2ww.png

nkozyra• 9 years ago

Trump and Twitter are in many ways inseparable and at least tangentially relevant to the article. It's unique that a sitting president would utilize a social platform so prominently, that so many people would have the opportunity to engage with him directly. It's argued that Trump's uptick in Twitter usage has raised its overall visibility as well.

So, it's not unfair to bring him up. It's also not inherently political to do so.

austincheney• 9 years ago

Fine, then substitute Kayne instead.

xenihn• 9 years ago

HN folks, does every post about Twitter need to be made about the president

The only regular exposure I have to Twitter comes from seeing articles and/or social media posts about Donald Trump's tweets.

nilkn• 9 years ago

I think this is the case for many folks -- myself included.

I never use or read Twitter directly either, nor do I see any reason for me to. I only see reports about what Trump has written on Twitter.

MrZongle23• 9 years ago

"The unwarranted injection of politics into every single discussion is getting very, very tiring."

Some folks won't be satisfied until everybody is clearly aware that they're deeply, DEEPLY unhappy with the 2016 election results.

This will continue for another three years, at which point things will change to how Candidate X is so much better, and we'll hear about Candidate X in everything. If Candidate X loses the 2020 election, expect a repeat of the current situation.

I'm sure there's a cicada analogy here somewhere.

grzm2• 9 years ago

I don't think your parent's sentiment necessarily has anything to do with the results of the election. Even before Nov. 8 2016 there's been plenty of debate about how much politics should play a role in HN, even beyond what the guidelines.

This is not the first time a member has mentioned wanting less politics. It's perfectly legitimate to want to be able to discuss articles without having politics added to it. The current submission makes no mention of politics in general or Trump in particular. Given how much discussion of politics is going on in other threads, it's understandable to want the bar to to drag it in to be higher. How much of what is being said is new?

untog• 9 years ago

He's not even in the top 25 most followed or active people on the site. Obama had more influence as #3!

I think that's entirely the wrong metric. Obama used/uses Twitter to duplicate content that is being released as a press release, TV appearance, etc. etc.

Trump does not. His thoughts are "first on Twitter", and the combination of that plus the fact that he is the President of the United States means that he is an absolutely integral part of the Twitter story, whether you like it or not.

sctb• 9 years ago

This kind of comment, though surely well-intended, unfortunately doesn't push us in the right direction. The best move is to just post civilly and substantively on the topic at hand.

Edit: do flag unwarranted injections of politics, because you're right that we're not here for that either.

Karunamon3• 9 years ago

What would you suggest I do?

Given the comment score over the past few minutes, this is a contentious issue, and not one I'm willing to risk my flagging privileges (or other backend consequences like slowdowns or post throttles) for.

"Commenting substantively" about Twitter does nothing about the political flamebait that always winds up in threads about the subject, yet the only tool I have to combat it could blow up in my face.

freehunter2• 9 years ago

As of right now there are three posts that mention Trump: One that's down voted to the bottom of the page, one where it's just one out of three points being made, and the third is yours.

bekman• 9 years ago

of course, it's barely growing.

riprowan• 9 years ago

this is the sad truth.

Twitter is a perfect example of something that could have worked as a small company with moderate expectations and a tight budget. Instead they presumed that "eventually" the money would catch up to their Fortune 500 ambitions, if they could just get enough eyeballs.

Welcome to the new "real world" of the "Long Tail," Twitter. Turns out that being the #2 social network, just like being the #2 music streaming service, the #2 ride-sharing network, or the #2 search result means a big step down in importance, reach, and profit potential in the Long Tail world (and being #50 puts you in a completely different zip code altogether).

Twitter created expectations that it cannot meet.

reubenswartz• 9 years ago

Agree that Twitter could have been great with different expectations.

However, I don't even think they're number 2. Depending on how you count it, that's got to be WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, or LinkedIn.

ProAm• 9 years ago

Twitter created expectations that it cannot meet.

Yes but in reality they can massively scale down, layoff hundreds and be a very profitable company. How many employees do you believe it really takes to run Twitter? Maybe 100?

After they do this, someone can buy it and take it private and print money for 10 years.

lostlogin• 9 years ago

The number 2 music streaming servicd has a rather healthier balance sheet if I recall correctly.

dglass2• 9 years ago

It's impossible to follow a twitter conversation if you don't understand how twitter works. It's a huge barrier to entry for new users and I don't think they'll start growing again until they fix this problem

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Would you please suggest a good overview of this? I've been on Twitter for years and sometimes use 3rd party clients, and my UX still sucks. I can follow Twitter conversations but find it virtually impossible to initiate one. I limit the time I spend using it because it makes me feel autistic, whereas I find other social media liberating.

the_economist• 9 years ago

Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.

The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.

Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.

wslh• 9 years ago

Linus Torvalds uses Google+. Compare https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds to https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds/with_replies?lang=en

Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.

Navarr• 9 years ago

Robert Scoble uses Facebook.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer

Of note for Scoble is that there's much more room to talk on Facebook than twitter. I wonder if that's a similar reason that Torvalds uses G+

bluedino• 9 years ago

Carmack used to, didn't he? Until Facebook hired him?

pasbesoin2• 9 years ago

Torvalds. David Brin. Tim O'Reilly (although Tim uses or used to use multiple platforms in an ongoing fashion). Randall Schwartz. A few others I'm not thinking of right now.

Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.

Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.

OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.

In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.

Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.

And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.

If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.

supergreg• 9 years ago

Is there a service that can aggregate posts from people in Google+, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, patreon, etc?

jeron• 9 years ago

I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.

toomuchtodo3• 9 years ago

There's no reason he couldn't do the same with a mailing list.

Twitter might have value, but no route to profitability.

Edit: Y'all are super salty about Twitter falling apart. Sad!

acchow2• 9 years ago

I follow musicians' pages on Facebook - they announce all kinds of things there.

ghaff2• 9 years ago

for celebrities to interact with their fans.

More like broadcast to their fans.

Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.

overcast• 9 years ago

Which a mailing list would accomplish the same thing. In fact, I would prefer I just receive email directly from people I follow, rather than a separate stupid app.

mtw• 9 years ago

It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.

schnevets• 9 years ago

And a Snap is volatile and even more frivolous! Maybe they're even MORE valuable!

danjoc• 9 years ago

yet Twitter is unable to profit from it.

Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.

xyzzy4• 9 years ago

They're potentially able to profit from it, but they feel the need to have thousands of employees.

swamp40• 9 years ago

They should charge you for each 'like' you get for a post. First 100 would be free.

gdubs3• 9 years ago

It's reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie 'Network').

News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Oh I care about the power of FB posting and indeed instagram. I think you're seriously underestimating the reach and popularity of those platforms.

gozur88• 9 years ago

You can reach people on Twitter, but there's some question as to how much you can influence people. Periodically I see articles from people with hundreds of thousands of followers who admit to being unable to translate that into sales, or hits to their site, or votes, or whatever.

Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.

Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.

AznHisoka• 9 years ago

thats untrue.

Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.

dglass2• 9 years ago

powerful != profitable

Finnucane• 9 years ago

I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.

creativityland• 9 years ago

I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter?

There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.

dhimes4• 9 years ago

When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it.

Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.

WillyOnWheels• 9 years ago

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en is probably his most controversial tweet

teej• 9 years ago

Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter.

I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.

sbarre2• 9 years ago

Twitter simplifies re-broadcasting and discovery..

Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.

I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.

I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.

iak8god• 9 years ago

The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.

The President of the United States, for instance.

coldpie2• 9 years ago

Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.

tigershark3• 9 years ago

Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter? If you really enjoy it finance it with your money. I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter. It's a sad world in which we are living. If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars. Wait for it.

Pxtl• 9 years ago

I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time.

I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.

As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.

pavel_lishin• 9 years ago

if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you

I don't have this problem, but the only people that follow me are typically my friends who may be interested in the things I have to say.

dtornabene2• 9 years ago

I did the same a year ago, largely agree with this, though I would note that it has been extremely useful to follow journalists (and comedy people/funny users). Specifically in regard to journalists however, I feel, just barely, that its worth it. One is able to gain a sense of what these people actually feel, away from an editorial board. Which is both enlightening and highly useful, if you actually devote time to reading journalism. Its also been very useful for organizing, as in, "there is a rally ya'll, come to such and such, like, now". More than once I've missed emails or other communications that would have pulled me into an action, meeting or other event but saw references to it on twitter and was able to make it at the last minute.

rtpg• 9 years ago

I follow developers and journalists, and spend a decent amount of time replying to things I see. I usually get responses from people.

I've found that twitter has gotten close to replacing email for sending a message to a "stranger" (software dev, journo).

I post stuff more for myself. I get sad when my clever tweets don't get looked at, but just writing is fun too.

joeblau• 9 years ago

This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment.

I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.

mfukar• 9 years ago

Can't tell if you're serious or just have an aptitude at this.

acveilleux• 9 years ago

Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.

tarr11• 9 years ago

It is interesting that PG doesnt participate here anymore, at all. Wonder why?

positr0n• 9 years ago

He used to. His comments and posts and slowed down over the years though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

boobsbr• 9 years ago

On twitter, I speak into the void.

My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.

camus2• 9 years ago

People use Twitter to broadcast something without wanting to have a real discussion about the thing they just said.

There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess.

You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).

genericpseudo2• 9 years ago

News is not monetizable because real, actual news is depressing and no-one wants to run ads for chocolate next to pictures of starving kids.

It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.

brightball• 9 years ago

It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it.

There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.

It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.

EliRivers• 9 years ago

I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you.

It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.

psyc• 9 years ago

Twitter lets you mention anybody. Unless they've blocked you, they will be notified that you mentioned them. It's like /u/username on Reddit, but on Twitter it's the standard way to address people.

kisstheblade• 9 years ago

Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets. I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.

jdminhbg• 9 years ago

When people talk about getting their news from Twitter, they don't literally mean they never leave Twitter for information. 140 characters is enough for a headline and a link; you click through to articles that interest you.

Spooky23• 9 years ago

Twitter is a tragedy of the commons type scenario.

It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.

puranjay• 9 years ago

A man became the most powerful person on the planet using Twitter, so yeah, it is very effective!

Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.

philwelch• 9 years ago

There's another side to Twitter:

I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
So we filter our inputs.
...
Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
...
Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...

gottam• 9 years ago

To fix this "problem" they've been spending money on human moderators to filter content, tags, and ban people. They're spending money on employees to remove discussions and eyes from the site, which counter intuitive if their goal is to become profitable, nor does it solve the problem ultimately.

Mikeb85• 9 years ago

And if Twitter goes away, there will be another platform to take its place.

martin-adams2• 9 years ago

Yes, I've noticed the BBC quoting tweets as part of their news reporting on a regular basis. It really is an influential tool.

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

In Denmark, Twitter penetration has been fairly weak, while Facebook has been extraordinary.

Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week.

Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.

edblarney3• 9 years ago

Lofty valuations are based on expectations of a lot of growth in subs and $/sub.

Even though they have a lot of users and some $/sub - without the growth it won't justify the valuation multiple.

So they have to get priced more like a normal company, with normal growth rates.

Which is the 'bubble burst' that so many post-IPO companies have to face. There's a few that can keep it going, or make up for it in other ways ... but not Twitter.

I feel Snap may be in the same category: their offer at least today is somewhat nichy. My mother uses Facebook, but will never use Snapchat as it is today.

ambicapter• 9 years ago

but will never use Snapchat as it is today.

Snapchat is completely covered in sponsored content now. Unless you have dozens of people you follow, ads make up the majority of the experience.

hoschicz• 9 years ago

But users do not realize it and they are happy. All of the ads prove some value to the user (Discover, Our Story...)

chrishacken• 9 years ago

I'm not sure I'd compare Snap with Twitter. Twitter has essentially flat-lined. Snap has only been monetized for a little over a year now and has at least demonstrated that they're capable of bringing in revenue, based on their ~$350M in 2016 and $1B 2017 projection. They're just beginning and I think they'll find more ways to capitalize on their large user base in the future.

edblarney3• 9 years ago

I see your point - but when Twitter went public, they were still growing, and their valuation was lofty, based on expectations of considerably more growth.

Snapchat is in possibly a weaker situation: they are not making any money - and in order to justify their valuation, they really do have to grow for a long period of time.

I believe that Snap is 'similar to Twitter' in that Snap will not become like Facebook - i.e. 'ubiquitous and incumbent'.

I believe that Snap will likely 'hit a wall' in growth at some point.

The greater risk is that Snapchat may be a fad.

Twitter 'was a fad', but when the hype died down - they are still kind of a broadly usable tool for media, celebs - Tweets are used extensively in reporting coverage. This gives a lot of stickyness to the platform.

Snap ... is the 'zen cool' thing for 18-26 year olds ... but that could change very quickly. There's no reason that their user base can just switch to FB messenger (where everyone else is), SMS or whatever to do 'regular communication' when they are too old to be 'sharing irreverent stories'. And the 14-year-olds today, when they turn 18-ish may have some other cool thing to do.

So if we can separate the 'fad' and 'utility' parts of the platform - Facebook has a good deal of 'utility' that applies to a very broad base. Twitter has some 'utility' to a narrower base.

I'm weary that Snapchat just doesn't have the kind of 'utility' that it needs to survive after the 'fad' dies down.

That said, they have been good at innovating and 'staying cool'. A lot of brands manage to 'stay relatively cool'. They could adapt/evolve into something consistently cool, or consistently useful. Possibly. But there's nothing on the roadmap that says they would.

Which is why I think there is risk in this.

dhimes4• 9 years ago

Please, what are "subs" and "$/sub"? I haven't heard of these. Thank you.

freehunter2• 9 years ago

Subscribers and dollars per subscriber.

edblarney3• 9 years ago

'sub' is the business shorthand for 'subscriber'.

$/sub is revenue per subscriber.

$/sub, sub growth, 'cost of acquisition' of each sub, (and assumptions about margins) is what 95% of the valuation is based on.

Now that they are 'going IPO' they're not going to be judged so much on 'lofty ambitions' and 'intangible market opportunities' - they are going to be judged mostly on 'how much free cash flow' they can generate over time.

So, $/sub (minus the cost to acquire each sub) and some assumptions about operating margins gives you the how much free cash flow per customer they can expect. This is widely different on different platforms.

Sub growth tells you how many customers investors can expect over time.

Hence profits.

Obviously it's very crude, and there's a lot more to it - but that is the most essential, basic economic equation that investors will look at to determine a valuation.

Snaps $/sub right now is negative at the 'net' level - i.e. after R&D, etc. - but the key metric people will be interested in is the 'gross' revenue (and profits) per subscriber. The idea being - one day, 'R&D' costs will stop growing so much, and customer base will still grow quite a lot. R&D and Operational costs are spread over an ever increasing user base, which will put the per-subscriber net margins into the positive.

drops• 9 years ago

I just want Twitter to die as soon as possible so that people move on to a better (and hopefully a decentralized) alternative.

oxryly12• 9 years ago

In related news, app.net will shut down in March (http://blog.app.net/2017/01/12/app-net-is-shutting-down/).

ihuman• 9 years ago

Like Micro.Blog?

http://micro.blog/about

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Thanks for the tip.

xj92• 9 years ago

forget twitter, gnu/social is the future https://gnu.io/social/

condescendence2• 9 years ago

While I would like to see this as the future of social relations, I doubt it in just about every aspect.

The reason services like twitter and snapchat are so dominate is because they're so easy to use and uniform across everything. It's why everyone now prefers slack/discuss to IRC and other legacy channels (among features aswell). Typical users don't have time to research and setup software, they simply just want to use it.

I understand that there's federated signup and all that, but the second you have to explain what any of that means to a user, you've basically lost them.

On the first listed GNU site:

  This is the place for you who are tired of private companies controlling your conversations and contacts and selling them for profit.

While I care deeply about what this statement has to say, I don't think my ideals fall in line with the average twitter user. They simply don't care about who's profiting off of it, as long as they get to announce their next vlog.

xj92• 9 years ago

of course, this isn't going to happen by itself. foss is famously bad at user acquisition and ui/ux. the interesting thing about federated (or federate-able) social networks is that they aren't designed as silos.

i'm in the very early stages of building a meta-social network[1] thing on top of matrix that gives you bi-directional access to gnu/social, irc, reddit, nntpchan, &c.

while I care deeply about what this statement has to say, I don't think my ideals fall in line with the average twitter user. They simply don't care about who's profiting off of it, as long as they get to announce their next vlog.

put your money where your mouth is and help us[2] fix it.

[1] https://source.heropunch.io/bbnet

[2] https://riot.im/app/#/room/#bbnet:matrix.heldscal.la

intrasight2• 9 years ago

I think of Twitter as free multicast SMS on the internet. There is no business model in that.

akuma73• 9 years ago

WhatsApp is 'just SMS' but it was bought for 20+ billion.

Twitter has a multitude of opportunities to monetize their user base. Their management has just done a poor job.

khazhou• 9 years ago

WhatsApp may have a healthy revenue stream, but I'll just point out that being acquired for huge $$$$ does not in itself make it a good business.

intrasight2• 9 years ago

WhatsApp has lots of users and makes no money. Sounds a lot like Twitter to me.

niftich• 9 years ago

WhatsApp was bought because it was popular in India and Brazil, markets that have historically been weaker for Facebook Messenger. Together, they ensured that Facebook would get a nigh-insurmountable lead in marketshare over Google in the messaging space [1].

Twitter in neither a threat to anyone, nor a strong candidate for a defensive purchase [2][3][4]. The two companies are hardly comparable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420732 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083975

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Yeah but people don't like being monetized. If someone has to pay to get a tweet in front of you then it's probably because nobody would bother to spread that information for free, so chances are any sponsored tweet has low value to the viewer. Conversely if you can have huge reach by paying then the (slim) value of social proof becomes meaningless because you're not really popular, you just bought the digital equivalent of a billboard in an attempt to seem popular. Adding too much money lowers the overall value proposition.

nunez• 9 years ago

Being bought doesn't mean it had the ability to turn a profit. I don't think WhatsApp would have been able to do this on its own at the donation-ware level prices they were asking for ($0.99/year).

vishalzone20022• 9 years ago

I think twitter needs to be saved. It obviously needs a lot of work especially with language and spam tweet filtering and fake accounts. But it is totally doable.

Why can't twitter charge a certain fee to official verified accounts of famous people who do use the platform to engage with their followers. And to justify their fee they can provide them with more tools at hand. I am not a very heavy twitter user but it is one social network product that has the power to do good and bad in real world.

vishalzone20022• 9 years ago

What was the negative point for?

pmcollins• 9 years ago

Twitter's operating expenses are on par with Tesla's. Not to diminish how hard it is to manage Twitter's load but their spending is way out of proportion. And their revenue is on the order of 2 bn/year; there's no fundamental reason they can't be profitable.

s_dev• 9 years ago

| Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.

| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.

| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.

- paul graham 09'

theoh• 9 years ago

Has anyone explored the design space that Twitter is a member of? It seems like it's just a cut-down version of publish-subscribe with a couple of eponymous channels (write, read) per user (and then the complexities of message threading).

The invention of hashtags was an attempt to add adhoc pub-sub channel support (not, as they are seemingly sometimes assumed to be, a metadata/folksonomy thing or an opportunity for a pithy closing phrase.)

All this is easy to duplicate. Is any of it even patented by Twitter?

rrdharan• 9 years ago

http://blog.app.net/2017/01/12/app-net-is-shutting-down/

eigenbom• 9 years ago

Mastodon.social

jessaustin2• 9 years ago

Because they haven't tried to control it too much...

Was this true in '09? It doesn't seem like it has been true in a long time.

duggan• 9 years ago

In '09, sure. That was the golden era of random apps filling in gaps in the core product, like Twitpic, etc.

metaphorm3• 9 years ago

at what point do we all wake up from the momentary lapse of reason and admit that Twitter is not a good idea? it's not a good way to communicate (unless propaganda and vicious harrassment is what you're going for). it's not a good way to make money. it's not a good way to advertise. it's not good for anything really.

pedalpete3• 9 years ago

Those trying to further a cause such as the Arab spring my beg to differ.

Twitter is an important platform for open communication.

metaphorm3• 9 years ago

Arab spring

oh? and how did they turn out for everyone?

facepalm• 9 years ago

I still think it is pretty good for following interesting people. I have signed off from Facebook because I kept getting drawn into useless political discussions. That happens on Twitter, too, but it doesn't lend itself to neverending arguments in the same way. And it is easier to follow a diverse crowd of people.

hizanberg• 9 years ago

I've never seen a company in such an advantageous market position as Twitter, do so little with so many employees. They benefit from so much free advertising through self-promotion where people proudly display their twitter handle on TV or at the end of news stories and articles yet they're still unable to achieve any growth or noticeably improve their product.

From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.

Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.

I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.

eliben• 9 years ago

Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets

I thought that the immutability of tweets is a feature, to be honest.

justifier2• 9 years ago

git style version control would be ideal: retain the old but allow for minds to change; goog's cloud office suite already does it

personally i find the editing almost as important as the content(o)

seeing what people change and when can illuminate context that would be hidden from a first thought best thought adherence

(o) http://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/yal.00049.001_...

symlinkk• 9 years ago

it is. if you give people the ability to edit tweets they could switch them out to something obscene when they get embedded in a news article, for instance. the whole point of twitter is to have small, public, immutable statements tied to someone's name.

ilogik• 9 years ago

They also do other things, such as mobile advertising.

baron816• 9 years ago

I think Twitter's business model should be to charge users based on the number of followers they have. Give them a free threshold of say 10K followers, and then charge them a fee after that. Users clearly benefit, and often profit, from their large follower base. Twitter should profit from it too.

idiot_stick• 9 years ago

Give them a free threshold of say 10K followers, and then charge them a fee after that. Users clearly benefit, and often profit, from their large follower base. Twitter should profit from it too.

Interesting idea, in theory. In reality, the "thought leaders" will simply move to another platform that is "free". Is Twitter markedly different than Facebook/G+/Instagram/Snapchat/email?

r00fus• 9 years ago

Wouldn't it be more social (in the sense that human organizations are often hierarchical/weblike) in this way?

You are a thought leader - you'd want to have your immediate 10k followers to retweet your message to their groups.

If you absolutely needed more leverage, you'd pay for the privilege.

ng12• 9 years ago

Or the inverse -- the Patreon model. Twitter already had the hard stuff down (network effect, verified users). Add some content distribution model and bingo, paid followers.

pvdebbe• 9 years ago

And now script kiddies would be blackmailing prominent beginners: "pay us $1k or we get 25k bots to follow you".

Animats• 9 years ago

Twitter is useful, but needs to be smaller as a business. If they focus on their core business, tweets, and get rid of at least half the employees, they'll be profitable. They just have to accept that they're no longer a growth company.

curiousfiddler• 9 years ago

<rant>

I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.

I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?

There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:

1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?

2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.

3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.

4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?

5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.

</rant>

vthallam• 9 years ago

How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?

This is definitely true. They don't at all try to get the young demographic while FB always makes small changes to keep it fun(video profile pics, reactions etc).

brilliantcode• 9 years ago

Will we see the same fate for other low interest capital fueled profits-are-so-yesterday unicorns? Dare I say Facebook even?

mpg33• 9 years ago

I don't even think the product is bad...they just haven't been able to discover a successful business model.

ddingus• 9 years ago

Punishment? Wasn't Twitter missing from transition team meetings?

btilly• 9 years ago

Given the choice between believing stock analysts and stock prices, I err on the side of believing the price.

The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.

And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.

bittercynic• 9 years ago

The market may not be irrational, but I think that's only because the concept of rationality doesn't apply to markets.

bcg1• 9 years ago

When analysts start to throw in the towel on a company, that is not a good sign.

I've been led to believe that is the exact opposite of the truth. Isn't the consensus most bullish at the top and most bearish at the bottom? Its almost self evident that a stock is most hated when it is low and most liked when it is high. That's not to say that it can't go lower and so from a short term trading perspective it might not be good, but at some point the sellers will be exhausted and shorts will have to be covered and the trend will reverse. Unless Twitter they are so broke that they are going out of business, at some point it will become a good buy.

pedalpete3• 9 years ago

I was eyeing up the chart for evidence of this, because my knee-jerk reaction was similar to yours.

I'm still not sure how to judge this. The stock is essentially at the same place it was last year. There was some growth through Sept, Oct (hmmm...election??) but then it came back down to the mid-teens.

At this point, the stock is trading higher than expectations, which I think could be a good thing.

I didn't know about the earnings call when somebody mentioned Twitters disastrous stock price yesterday, I took some of that to be due to Snap filing, and investors looking at the market realising that much of Twitter's revenue will be moving over to Snap. That has probably already happened, but putting an IPO out likely raises a few eyeballs.

234dd57d2c8dba• 9 years ago

Between the censorship, the "banning people for reporting child porn" thing, and the lack of new products and features (what are they spending so much money on, they spend as much as Tesla for crying out loud!) I think it's well deserved scorn from Wall Street.

adventured• 9 years ago

What Twitter should do is extraordinarily obvious.

They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.

At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.

They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.

If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.

foobarian• 9 years ago

I keep wondering about their part-time CEO. That has got to have some impact on the company culture. Just imagine how you would feel if your CEO couldn't be bothered to commit to the company full-time; would you in turn make suboptimal decisions through apathy? And then multiply that by everyone in the command chain.

dfischer• 9 years ago

I was going to type something like this and gladly found another person with similar thoughts. I firmly believe this is the right direction to go.

Of course, it's easy to suggest. I have to wonder though - what could really be the need for so many expenses? Is it impractical to cut down significantly and ride the success of the tech itself and sustain it with a much smaller set of teams?

nodesocket• 9 years ago

Twitter is the perfect case of a technology company that should have never gone public. They should have followed their valley peers with inflated valuations and no actual business and take private equity and foreign investment. Wall Street calls bullshit when they see it, and smart people short these types of companies. Silicon Valley doesn't provide a way to short these propped-up companies, they just continue to self-promote themselves on private equity and foreign investment. Wall Street is the most perfect market in the world.

maverick_iceman• 9 years ago

The board was wrong to allow Jack Dorsey to be the CEO of two public companies at the same time.

nickgrosvenor• 9 years ago

Short Facebook, Buy Twitter

imron• 9 years ago

1) Open up to third party developers.

2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.

3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).

4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).

You're welcome.

dxhdr• 9 years ago

I think this could actually work in a few years. Developers will have long forgotten about the last time Twitter crushed everyone relying on their API. Then, once their revenue is up the power will go to their heads and they can repeat the cycle all over again.

bduerst• 9 years ago

That's one way to create a feed of affiliate spam.

antoinevg• 9 years ago

Free Twitter business plan suggestion:

Given Twitter's utility to the rich, famous and powerful why not introduce a follower limit of say 1000?

If you want to allow more people than that to follow you then Twitter will sell you an increase in that limit.

zherbert• 9 years ago

1) Make a better version with extra features tailored to celebs and businesses. 2) Charge for the better version.

Wall Street Is Giving Up On Twitter

Related Stories