
Jack Dorsey's two years as Twitter's CEO have not saved the company - coloneltcb
https://www.recode.net/2017/10/4/16382954/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-progress-stock-tweets-140-video-live-users
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ajc-sorin
A quick glance at Twitter's 2016 Annual report: 2016 Revenue: 2.5B 2015
Revenue: 2.2B 2014 Revenue: 1.4B 2013 Revenue: 660m

In the past 2 years, Revenue almost doubled. Over 700m gets spent on R&D each
year - if they cut that they become profitable day 1.

The article says "by all metrics Twitter has failed," but only quoted the
lagging (buy still positive) rate of new users and declining stock price.

The may have missed opportunities, but to say Twitter "failed" or "Doesn't
have a business model" is ignorant of the financial facts: Twitter could cut
R&D investment, stop acquiring companies or building features and have a
return on assets almost 50% greater than Facebook's. Twitter may not be as
'profitable' as Facebook, but it sure as hell uses its assets better.

It does seem like Twitter is starting to reach an upward cap on its virality.
If management doubles down on making a well-oiled machine instead of trying to
be the next Facebook, they could be a great dividend investment. This isn't
sexy, but it's definitely an enviable position.

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chollida1
I think I've said this more than a few times now but TWTR and SNAP are very
similar stocks.

Great ides, great management but very poor businesses. It's just too bad for
SNAP that TWTR came first and wall street learned quickly and applied the
lessons learned from TWTR to SNAP.

Both companies are moving sideways now in terms of stock prices as almost no
one thinks they are going to turn into great businesses but they also have
huge markets and no one wants to miss out on the odd chance that they finally
figure out a business model.

I think they both have to find a way to segregate their own users into
appropriate bins such that each bin doesn't have to associate with the others.
I mean I use TWTR mostly for news sources for work, and personal and don't
care about mixing the two.

Tweetdeck is one example of such binning that makes TWTR so much better than
the default view that it really surprises me that its' not the default view.

I think the probe is that the advertising model like Google and Facebook use
just isn't going to work well with Twitter. I can't think of a single add that
they could server me that I'd have any interest in at all.

That's why I was excited by moves like streaming NFL games, that's something I
would pay for and a revenue model that might work.

The fact that TWTR has been around for this long and still hasn't figured out
a viable business model falls squarely on management and is a very good
indication of just how poorly they have performed at their job.

They have to get this figured out or the money will walk away and someone else
will buy them at terms that aren't going to be very fun for the existing
shareholders and employees.

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jbob2000
I am of the opinion that Twitter can't be monetized. If this were 30 years
ago, twitter would be a technical standard/protocol like email (SMTP), not a
private company, that anyone could implement and run a service off of.

Twitter (read: tweeting) is just another facet of human communication. You
can't monetize it just like you can't monetize _writing_ or _speaking_ or
_emailing_. If you try to, people navigate around it. Charge for tweets? Dead
service, new one pops up that does the same thing. Can't get enough
advertising dollars because the content is unpredictable. Can't get big
advertising promotions because big money doesn't want to be seen next to
racist tweets.

In short, twitter has a humanity problem.

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chatmasta
Twitter made $574 million revenue last quarter. Clearly their is some demand
for their monetization strategies. The problem is that their costs are so
high; they lost $174m. Perhaps the real issue with twitter is inflated staff,
overengineering, and excessive compute costs.

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jbob2000
Could you imagine if one company tried to control and monetize _writing_? Your
costs would be astronomical too! They need all those staff, and probably more,
because controlling billions of people's communication style takes aallloottt
of work.

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zo1
Not just communication style. They police content, too.

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metalliqaz
IMHO, the problem with Twitter is that they haven't adequately embraced the
noise. I think that's what really sets twitter apart from other big social
products like Facebook and Instagram. It's the ceaseless cacophony of
information flying by in real time. Their efforts to make sense of it somehow
manage to feel slow, and yet also too superficial. I have assumed this is due
to a confused attempt to incorporate marketing/advertising into the platform.

They should embrace the waves of human sentiment by giving users a way to ride
it, and selling customers a way to follow it.

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kevando
I feel like media companies (like recode, cnn) are really going after social
tech companies (like twitter, facebook) right now.

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CM30
Given what social media companies have done to their businesses, are you
surprised? A larger and larger amount of the population gets their news from
social networking sites rather than media organisations nowadays. Stuff like
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the biggest 'competitors' the likes of CNN
have nowadays.

~~~
kevando
I'm not really surprised, but I also don't really understand the comparison.
Facebook/Twitter distribute news, they don't create it.

~~~
CM30
Not directly. But their users create and post news, and for a decent
percentage of the population, said users are more reliable/better quality than
mainstream media organisations. This is especially true with specialist
accounts on Twitter, which can be better news sources than proper websites.

So in the same way that gaming sites are now often losing to YouTube channels
and Twitch streamers as a source of news/reviews/opinions, the media is losing
to individuals sharing their stories online.

