Twitter's debt assigned 'junk' status

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30048344

by InternetGiant • 12 years ago

151 111 12 years ago

ilghiro• 12 years ago

I find Twitter and it's user base incredibly interesting. On the one hand it's portrayed as an "Everyone" product. There's no reason you or your friend Bill or your boss or your Grandma couldn't use it. Because of that people have historically signed up in droves and it's valuation has increased.

In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.

I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.

cpach• 12 years ago

Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)

stingraycharles• 12 years ago

This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone?

I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?

nhstanley• 12 years ago

Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO.

Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.

diminish• 12 years ago

In similar lines here are my observations as a heavy business and personal user:

1. 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Most "interesting" content is typed or pictured in the attachment and the 140char limit is simply worked around

2. Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.

3. Twitter mobile apps don't work properly when mobile. You can't favorite, retweet or comment properly while in an unreachable zone. My 2008 hobby Android 1.1 app has a local queue to cope with remote updates, inserts and Twitter can't implement this?

4. Families aren't on Twitter. Friends to a certain degree. Colleagues to a certain degree. Celebrities/followers yes. Gamers no. Protestors yes.

5. Facebook, LinkedIn implemented the "follow" feature quite successfully.

6. Notifications work, Discover not much.

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

They could work on a conversation view, and to not count the @mentions in the character limit.

logicallee• 12 years ago

Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.

unclebucknasty• 12 years ago

recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.

I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach?

Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold.

The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.

brador• 12 years ago

I recently reinstalled adblock after seeing my first 30 second ad on youtube. I had happily used the web for 3 years without it.

rmsaksida• 12 years ago

I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it.

Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note.

My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her.

Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people.

I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me.

As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short.

Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment.

It's not you, Twitter. It's me.

tptacek2• 12 years ago

Things Twitter is fantastic at:

* Real-time breaking news

* Event planning and announcements

* Trial balloons for events, products, projects

* Humor

* Broadcasting the location of food trucks, or specials at a restaurant, or sudden openings at Alinea, &c

* Staying connected to broad but specific peer groups, like "everyone who does software security"

* Announcing and promoting content; specific example: getting a specific group of people to read a blog post

Facebook is good at very few of these things. Twitter is like a more efficient, more far-reaching version of the Facebook news feed; Facebook is a more intimate and conversational version of Twitter.

There has always been a weird rap on Twitter's lack of use cases, despite the fact that lots of people seem to find ways to use it effectively. A couple years ago, the rap was that the only reason to join Twitter was to follow celebrities. Nobody says that anymore; now it's "the only reason to join Twitter is if you're an extravert". Well, celebrities are 0.00001% of humanity, and extraverts are about half of it, so I'd say Twitter is making progress.

rsync• 12 years ago

"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it."

I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ? BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums.

I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter.

If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.

dabeeeenster• 12 years ago

Do people still take these ratings agencies seriously after what happened 6 years ago?

danieltillett7• 12 years ago

When they rate a bond as junk yes. We can be suspicious when they rate some garbage as AAA, but given the economics of the ratings business when they tell you something is junk then it probably is.

gldalmaso• 12 years ago

At least until they start to receive bigger bonuses based on low ratings.

bdg3• 12 years ago

The rating was an unsolicited rating.

A number of empirical papers have shown that unsolicited ratings are significantly lower than solicited ratings, both in the U.S. market and outside the U.S

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2013/12/29/the-economic...

madaxe_again• 12 years ago

This is what happens when you continually base valuations on number of users, rather than, say, revenue, or profitability. Yes, a user base can be an indicator of a company with traction - but if there's no revenue, or no functioning model which will lead to revenue... the value is entirely hypothetical, and based on weak foundations.

I expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing, which will culminate in the current bubble conclusively popping. It'll only take a few more S&P announcements like this to cause a panic sell-off, at which point... let's party like it's 1999.

cmdkeen• 12 years ago

Well it is also the difference between bonds and equities. You might value a company on users if you think it could monetise them down the line for equities as you will share in that.

Bonds however just rely on the company having cashflow to pay the interest and then repay the capital. Number of users, future profit etc are much less meaningful compared to whether you will get your money back as promised.

jrallison2• 12 years ago

It's not hypothetical. Twitter has significant revenue. When revenue is generated from eyeballs (ads), then yes, number of users and engagement is a valuable metric (yet not the only one).

danieltillett7• 12 years ago

The problem is Twitter has even more significant expenses. What worries the bond rating agencies is if this will ever change.

nikcub• 12 years ago

Twitter's valuation isn't based on users - the stock is down ~35% this year despite user growth being 22% and revenue more than doubling.

The stock is being trashed because they missed earnings.

The S&P report itself said Twitter is experiencing very strong growth and little competitive pressure. It was downgraded because Twitter are investing their cash rather than hoarding it. Bond holders want companies to hold cash. What is good for bond holders is usually different to what is good for stock holders.

The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good, the company is growing like crazy and that the market is undervaluing based on earnings which mostly missed because of one-off employee option and other writedowns as well as reinvestment.

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

It's really funny that within 12 months of an IPO a company can be scolded for investing their cash rather than hoarding it. Hilarious, really.

jon-wood• 12 years ago

The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good.

I'm not sure I agree with that statement. They've got a lot of users, many of which love the service, but as a business the fundamentals are far from sound. I'm yet to be convinced that paid advertising is a model that will work on Twitter, and I can't really see any other model beyond persuading people to pay to hide the adverts (which destroys their advertiser base).

Twitter started as a hobby side project to communicate between a few friends, not a business, and you can see that in everything they do.

fallingmeat• 12 years ago

Can someone teach me how to use Twitter? Still don't get it. It's like an IRC channel for social media professionals, right?

Avalaxy• 12 years ago

There is no _the_ way to use it. But I can tell you about how I use it:

- I follow a couple of industry professionals and companies to stay up to date with their updates. As a MSFT developer I follow MSDN, the .NET team, but also important players like Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. By doing this I always get the latest updates.

- I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much... If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective. Be picky about who you follow. You don't have to follow your followers in return.

- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.

- I use the search to find what people are saying about my product, but sometimes I also use it to engage with people who are talking about a subject I'm interested in.

linkeex• 12 years ago

- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.

That one is a killer-feature right there I've managed to discover lately. Twitter completely sucks, because if you are just a normal person doing normal things noone will ever care about you. BUT, in case you're interested in some very specific topic and the contributing people then you should give twitter a try...

kyleashipley• 12 years ago

This is almost exactly how I use it as well. I find Twitter to be incredibly valuable, even though I scoffed at it for a couple years before finally signing up.

I also know many people who game their main feed by reciprocally following everyone for audience building, then set up lists for groups they actually care about. This makes the main view too noisy for me, but I could see that as a viable strategy.

eropple3• 12 years ago

If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective.

I am convinced, completely convinced, that the idea that you have to read every tweet in your timeline is why so many people don't get Twitter. Even constraining yourself like you describe seems just so silly. I follow 300 people, some of whom (manually) tweet A hundred times a day. I don't read all of them. I dip in and out as I have a few minutes of downtime.

It's a distributed sort of vaguely topical bar chatter. Trying to follow the whole thing is insane, and you have lists if you want to curate particular people.

frostmatthew3• 12 years ago

I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much

You might want to check out a small side-project of mine[1] which I created because I also don't like to follow people who tweet too much. Just put in a username and it'll show you how many times a day (on average) they tweet.

[1] https://www.shouldifollow.com/

lcmatt• 12 years ago

Sign up and follow people with similar interests. I follow very few people (approx 80) and remove anyone who starts tweeting things that's no longer relevant to me.

Within that timeline I get a decent amount of tech info from respected people in the industry and other small snippets from friends.

If you do as most people seem to and follow 500+ people you're never going to be able to keep up with the noise and to me it loses its value.

UweSchmidt2• 12 years ago

I used some library, something didn't work, asked a question on Stackoverflow, didn't get an answer. What to do?

Twittered the author, he twittered back, telling me that there's a bug, and here's the workaround, and invited me (and all his followers) to try that new product that replaces the thing I was using.

So it's a unique communication tool which found a sweet spot with opt-in, brevity, low involvement, and publicity.

(It's can also be anywhere from crappy to decent as a social network, a news aggregator, a blog site ... but I wouldn't bother with these aspects)

jeffwass• 12 years ago

How is that different from email? Are your back&fortu tweets with the author public or private?

(I'm not on twitter, if that helps frame my question).

Cakez0r• 12 years ago

I wonder if they'd accept an acquisition offer from Google or Facebook!

bdg3• 12 years ago

The article feels like a slam against them.

Twitter reported a ... 7% fall in timeline views per user
-a 23% growth in its user base in the third quarter.

... I can't tell if that's a net volume increase or decrease.

Twitter shares gave up most of the 7% gain made on Wednesday

If this is relevant to you, you're a day trader, and this would be very old news by this point. This is misleading as they're talking about the day-to-day price right next to the percent change over the year.

Its shares have lost 37% so far this year.

That's not true. http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei=afBlVNPuCsXmr...

They're down 3.87% (1.61 points) from IPO to now (less than 12 months). Even if I was confused and picked their performance as a "year to date" it would be 23% down. However, if I cherry pick my data and find the high point from the short-lived spike at a very specific date 10 months ago (not a year), their shares have fallen about 33%. I'm sure it was cherry picked for when "today" was also.

Basically. I think this is biased junk or a financially literate reporter.

Frustratingly, I can't find the report on S&P's site.

http://www.standardandpoors.com/en_US/web/guest/ratings/sear...

After some digging into actual financial news outlets we can discover this is actually an unsolicited rating which are famous for being poorly rated.

http://www.streetinsider.com/Credit+Ratings/S%26P+Assigns+Un...

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

Its shares have lost 37% so far this year.

I think they simply meant 2014, and then it is more or less accurate.

Jan 1st to now is not a pretty comparison. Whichever way you interpret the figures they definitely not look good.

bdg3• 12 years ago

What did you think of the Visa IPO one year on?

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

Their share price is nearly irrelevant to success since they can easily raise money through debt. They went to markets asking for 1.3 billion and offering nothing in return and the market said "why not 1.8?" If they were raising money through secondary equity offerings the their share price would matter. This debt rating also doesn't matter except to the chumps who own the debt. Twitter already has the money in the bank and 1.8 billion is a substantial amount of capital any way you look at it.

kgwgk• 12 years ago

Even if I was confused and picked their performance as a "year to date" it would be 23% down.

You seem indeed confused. "Year to date" is the only reasonable way to understand "so far this year" and the stock is down $23 (37%). From the all-time high closing price, it has lost $33 (45%).

Basically. I think this is biased junk or a financially literate reporter.

I guess you meant illiterate, but actually you got it right...

leeber• 12 years ago

This may or may not directly apply to twitter, but I really don't understand how unprofitable companies with no direct revenue model get such large valuations based on: number of users, and "potential" to profit from advertising.

Snapchat? Tinder? Twitter? Quora? Tumblr? Etc.

It seems like these are the companies that are viewed as prestigious and noteworthy by the media and startup community. Everybody wants to be the company that gets a massive funding from VC and millions of users. But all of these companies still have yet to prove they can really do it.

The only returns for investors so far is based on the fact that the theoretical valuation keeps going up, and it's self perpetuating. At what point are investors going to expect real earnings to justify the valuation?

Nobody (or very few people) seems to want to solve a real problem, or offer a really useful product that people are actually willing to pay for.

Everybody just wants to get a million users, get a bunch of money from investors, and cross your fingers that maybe one day you can figure out how to actually make the thing profitable. And if it doesn't work out? Well it's somebody else's problem right?

It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.

Probably sounds like I'm just a hater and ranting, but just my 2 cents.

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

The math goes something like 'expected customer lifetime value * number of customers'. Where the lifetime value is based on either some base assumptions about conversion to a premium product or some base assumptions about what they feel they can make of their users in terms of ad impressions or some other relatively low yield income stream. If this yields a huge number then everybody is happy.

This is further inflated by exits such as whatsapp and instagram, after all if they are worth that much then surely this other non-related product will be worth at least as much or more.

In the end, valuations have a pretty high random component and the perceived market can push that up or down tremendously.

Who even knows what drove this company to issue a warning like this, maybe one of their bigger customers is planning a take-over bid. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened either.

orbifold• 12 years ago

Twitter solves a "real problem". Relatively convenient 1:N communication, where N is the number of twitter users and at the same time a method to selectively subscribe to some of those messages by certain criteria (hashtags, selection of users). There is a reason why Television channels love Twitter, it has essentially the same characteristics as traditional broadcast television, plus some form of interactive feedback. That the system is centralised and has few message types is purely coincidental.

smackfu• 12 years ago

You are mixing together vastly different companies (public, private, mature, start-ups), and then ignoring companies that did make the transition to profit. So yeah, seems a bit like a rant.

no_future• 12 years ago

If companies get swallowed up by the Google/Facebook behemoths like so many do then investors usually get their exit, to make an example of 2 from your list Tumblr was bought for $1bn by Yahoo and Snapchat allegedly had multibillion dollar acquisition offers from Facebook and Google. Apparently the megacompanies don't buy these smaller companies for the value that could be generated by revenue streams from them(when and if), but more a combo of the "strategic advantage" - so their competitors don't snap them up first, or out of a fear that one of them could end up being a direct competitor to them one day, as is the case with the Facebook Instagram acquisition and attempted Snapchat acquisition.

pessimizer• 12 years ago

It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.

This only works until March 10th, 2000.

mbesto• 12 years ago

Precedence.

Facebook, Google and LinkedIn already proved it. No investor wants to feel dumb that they didn't invest their money in the "thing that looks just like FB and Google" even if the business model isn't a complete 1:1.

harryjo3• 12 years ago

Bonds are not stocks. There's no upside to a bond beyond "getting your money back with the agreed interest"

debacle• 12 years ago

I really don't know how anyone didn't see this coming. The Twitter IPO was the nail in the coffin for the company. It was wishful thinking that they would ever become profitable with their current model.

MisterMashable• 12 years ago

Interesting how Peter Thiel who froze $45,000 of assets of Facebook competitor Diaspora* has taken a special interest in bad mouthing Twitter, call them "horribly mismanaged" etc. It's very clear he wants Twitter to fail. Peter Thiel influenced the debt downgrade with his comments. Knowing how the world works Thiel may very well have called up an analyst and played some dirty tricks as in the case of Diaspora*.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

I doubt ratings agencies care what Peter Thiel says about anything.

duaneb• 12 years ago

Does ANYONE care what peter thiel thinks of twitter?

gushaprints• 12 years ago

I think they should keep the 150 characters as a limit for website

spindritf2• 12 years ago

In October, Twitter reported a disappointing 7% fall in timeline views per user - a closely watched measure of engagement - despite a 23% growth in its user base in the third quarter.

"Despite"? Not "because of" by any chance? That would be my first thought, that they simply diluted their hardcore audience.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Twitter have recieved a lot of flack lately for their poor handling of abuse complaints. Particularly in relation to #gamergate. I've no idea whether that makes a difference, but it's worth considering: abuse, like spam, is going to be a big problem for any communications service.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

One of the worst aspects is they'll close any issue referring to now-deleted tweets without any action.

I'm quite certain tweets are soft-deleted and accessible by the abuse team (if the Secret Service wanted one they'd get it) so it comes across as callous indifference.

jvagner• 12 years ago

Twitter has become a dumping ground for what used to be RSS. The "twitter" traffic is now really over at Instagram. Instagram needs to upgrade their product mix (multi- accounts), but geeks and news organizations are propping Twitter up, but it's not a general conversation or personal broadcasting tool anymore.

0x02• 12 years ago

It doesn't even really work well for that, what with its max 2k following limit. :(

ErikAugust• 12 years ago

Twitter is an elegant and open platform. It is what you make it. And over the course of Twitter’s relatively short existence, millions of users have creatively found ways to extract utility from it. Businesses use Twitter to grow – without paying the service anything. Businesses have also been built directly on top of the service.

So why can't Twitter take these and go directly to their users with them as use case options?

My thoughts, continued: http://erikaugust.com/thoughts/twitter/

sergiosgc• 12 years ago

Twitter is an elegant and open platform.

It's not open. After killing off lots of development happening in their platform with the token limit decision, they effectively shut off that avenue. No sane developer will base his bread and butter on Twitter now.

Some effects of that decision were positive, like increasing engagement with advertising. Lots were negative, namely non competition on mobile app space, or lack of innovation in the use of the platform.

I personally think it was a short term vision move, that effectively killed twitter in the long term. It'll never evolve as much as it needs to survive, now that it lost its developer ecosystem.

0x02• 12 years ago

Don't be fooled! I doubt the many developers of third party clients were happy to be surprise informed overnight that their apps would all be banned or limited to 100k users.

clarky07• 12 years ago

Aside from issues from a consumer standpoint, I was actually interested in testing the advertising for mobile apps. Unfortunately, they don't have an SDK for conversion tracking. They rely on third parties that charge for the conversion tracking. This is absurd. Every other advertiser I can think of provides conversion tracking. Without it, the advertising is worthless. It is the thing that provides value compared to other advertising mediums.

grandalf• 12 years ago

It sounds like Twitter didn't have enough cash to finance its growth and that the IPO didn't result in enough cash available to do whatever needs to be done.

So if you put the information together:

The IPO was triggered b/c some investors wanted to get out. The public funding was insufficient to fund whatever initiatives are going on. The debt issue was an attempt to get capital asap. The rating could have been easily predicted and so it must be the case that Twitter's management chose to take the hit of the bad PR in exchange for the cash provided by the debt. This suggests that Twitter expects to be in for some tough times ahead.

All this is probably very rational decision making and is probably the best bet the company has in an increasingly competitive market.

uhhok• 12 years ago

The comments here are just so funny. HN crowd once again trying to defend a useless product. I guess if twitter goes down the drain, it doesn't look good for your own products either.

serve_yay• 12 years ago

What an awful comment

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

I get plenty of use out of twitter, I'm sure all the millions of users also get use out of it or they wouldn't use it.

ColinCera4• 12 years ago

I've never understood why Twitter doesn't run way more ads than they do. When I view my Twitter timeline in a browser there's an enormous amount of unused space on both sides of the timeline and it would not bother me one little bit if they displayed some ads in that space. In fact, it would be much less distracting/detracting than sticking sponsored tweets into the middle of my feed.

Like most people, I find ads kind of annoying, but Twitter's an unusual case — I would be 0% less inclined to use Twitter if they put some ads in that totally unused space.

Twitter might lose approximately .01% of their users if they ran ads, but they'd be making billions in profits.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

What proportion of Twitter users access it through the browser, though? I suspect a lot of users (especially heavy ones) don't use it all that much.

That means ads need to be inserted into the stream, which is much more annoying. I'd argue that there are already too many, myself…

ColinCera4• 12 years ago

You're right. Now that I think about it, the majority of Twitter user probably happens on phones and tablets, where there is no out-of-feed real estate for advertising, and a smaller percentage of people on desktops use a native app instead of the browser site.

So the revenue potential is probably not as much as I'd imagined.

And I fully agree that I don't want to see an increased number of sponsored tweets inserted in my feed.

theklub• 12 years ago

How many people run ad block plus already? I feel like overwhelming people with ads would just push more to block them entirely.

ColinCera4• 12 years ago

Yes, but my point is that ads in the empty space around the central feed would not be "overwhelming" to anyone except chronic complainers.

Ad blocking is a problem for all ad-supported web sites. There are heavy-handed ways to thwart it, and I personally wouldn't mind if Twitter used such tactics — Twitter is a valuable service and I don't have any objection to them making money to keep the lights on and making a ton of profit on top.

getdavidhiggins• 12 years ago

I just wrote this as a response to the BBC article:

https://thoughtstreams.io/higgins/thoughts/6764/

Twitter's self immolation

I just read BBC's article about Twitter not being able to make a profit. It's the classic 'investor story time' narrative where Twitter now have to scramble to make money via whatever means necessary - even if that means harming the product. Example of harm recently are:

• Many spinoff projects not related to Twitter, like Music, Flight, and a myriad of other, quite splintered attempts at adding new features.

• ADs getting more aggressive; instead of a simple injected AD in the timeline - now we have newsletters and 'sign up' with the email you have registered with Twitter. Twitter cards are also being used to show rich media for 'partnered' brands. A far cry from small, polite injected ADs. Very few people make time for watching video in a Twitter reading session.

• A constantly shifting API that developers cannot trust, and have to relearn constantly. On top of sunsetted in-house features. Remember Twitter Anywhere? I feel like Twitter Widgets will vanish over-night and without much warning too. It turns out; I rely on these solutions very heavily. The 'very little adoption' argument is used to sunset these features, and it's a terrible argument, because it destroys webs of trust with developers.

What Twitter must realize is that Twitter is plumbing. I know that microblogging existed before it, and there are countless (better) alternatives like app.net - but things like app.net are geek toys just like Diaspora. Sure - the greybeard hackers love services like that - but it's not especially for the masses, and also services like Diaspora/ADN will never achieve the status of 'plumbing' (despite app.net's tagline as a platform for Apps.). Twitter got there first, and they must realize this.

So Twitter should give us back the API we all grew to love, and not deprecate it to impress investors. It needs an eco system. It's what made Twitter take off in the first place. When I first joined Twitter in 2007; it was classic bottom up technology, built by the people and the API evangelists. The recent bait-and-switch to 'consumer product' annoyed a lot of people. It's time to see whether Twitter can do another bait-and-switch and go back to its roots.

If they manage to achieve this bait-and-switch - it will be monumental. It will be big news. And I will not be muting Twitter in my timeline for it.

spindritf2• 12 years ago

Aren't cards available to everyone, not just partnered brands? Do they get different, more powerful cards?

anonbanker• 12 years ago

is this how the market is reacting to Twitter's convertible note offering? very interesting.

Twitter's debt assigned 'junk' status

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