
Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit - svtrent
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/twitter-posts-surprise-sales-gain-monthly-user-growth-stagnates
======
jjrh
I'm still amazed how bad the Twitter.com UI is. The fact stuff like
Hootsuite,tweetdeck and a zillion similar tools exist to effectively make
twitter usable if you follow more than a dozen people is crazy.

There is a whole bunch of innovation waiting to happen: for instance Twitter
could build a community around creating and sharing 'lists' for just about any
topic. I wanted to make a 'list' for every Canadian MP but man that's a lot of
work and surely someone has done it already but I have no clue how to find
that 'list'.

~~~
vram22
>I'm still amazed how bad the Twitter.com UI is.

Yes, I have been complaining about this sporadically for a while. I mean, I
once tweeted that you have to do a headstand to read the tweets in
chronological order [1], and even, the text will be upside down ... :) Some
time later, I think they have made some changes to that, for certain cases at
least, e.g. for a thread consisting of a tweet and replies to it. But in a
sense that makes things even more confusing, because now you have to sometimes
read things chronologically (a tweet and its replies), and sometimes in
reverse (the rest)!

Jokes apart, there are multiple issues with the UI.

[1] Yes, I know there may be a technical reason for the problem, but has
anyone at Twitter tried working on a solution?.

~~~
cialowicz
It would be interesting to play with a left-to-right timeline for any tweet
replies or conversations. It would leave the standard timeline alone, but
allow users to scroll right to deep dive into specific conversations.

~~~
wavefunction
How would you limit the horizontal scrolling to only one conversation?

------
bad_user
I've been very active on Twitter in the past 2 years and not due to Trump or
other controversies.

A lot of developers I want to follow are active on Twitter.

So it might be due to Trump, don't know, but I'm glad it's going well for
them.

~~~
kirRoyale
Twitter has become so bloated with advertisements and "artificial" trending
topics that its nearly useless.

~~~
darkerside
Corollary: Twitter is so useful that it seems to be thriving despite being
bloated with advertisements and "artificial" trending topics

~~~
meowface
Things can thrive without being very useful.

------
zanny
In the last two years I've seen a large migration of digital artists off of
traditional gallery sites (Deviantart, Artstation, etc) to Twitter as their
"gallery". The same thing happened with Tumblr circa 2012-2014, but even those
folks are moving to twitter instead of using a dedicated site designed for
showcasing art.

I've never had a Twitter account because I'd much rather see ostatus and
decentralized networks succeed, and Twitter has never offered anything
meaningful in the past, but if this trend continues I'll be stuck signing up
there just like I did with Tumblr not to use it as a social network but as a
media consumption platform (as was mentioned in the article, video is also
growing). Its also similar to how musicians were nigh forced to start using
Youtube as their primary jumping off point over Bandcamp and Soundcloud
because that was where the eyeballs were.

What kind of backwards world would it be if artists, musicians, animators, etc
are all using Twitter as their primary distribution platform just because of
the network effects. Same reason Tumblr took off in those circles. It doesn't
matter if the UI is lacking even the barest support for effective navigation
of media, its all about social bridging and getting into feeds. In my
experience about 80% of artists and writers that use Tumblr have their
creative works inaccessible because they are buried under a mountain of
reblogs and non-content filler posts with limited to no means to filter or
navigate them.

I'd hope this trend doesn't continue, but it almost certainly will. Those
making a living for themselves through online media are doing so via network
effects and memes. Get a breakout success, get into peoples "feeds", and
spread through casual retweets and reblogs. Its never about discovery or
wanting to _find_ them, its them getting randomly referred to you through the
hive mind, and that creates a handful of wildly successful winners and a sea
of equally competent and capable creators that never gain any traction.

~~~
snoman
The trend certainly will continue, if only because that's how it's always
worked - even before twitter, or even the internet. TV, radio, newspapers,
publishers, etc. have always had this power - you had to market yourself to
enough people for someone with influence in one of the aforementioned medias
to consider you worthy and propel you to visibility and success.

One might even say that the current state of affairs, or trend, is preferable
because it's not some small group of people acting as gatekeepers, but instead
it's "the hivemind" as you've put it.

------
Steeeve
Twitter loves Trump.

It's not just twitter... the whole profit center around online communities is
based on active communities. Most topics are cyclical - once the Superbowl is
over, it's hard to keep a football community active. Only so many people are
interested in the draft, in coaching changes, etc.

But throw in some controversy and all of a sudden everything lights up again.

The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much
controversy. They have lives to lead. They _need_ to be happy. But as more and
more profit centers are tied to active online communities, and as people who
run those communities strive to keep people active, and since controversy is
as easy a tool to use as there is in the toolbox... Well the end result is
that online interaction shifts from being something that brings people
together into something unhealthy.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a great tool for getting up to the moment
information out there and for consuming it. I just wonder what there bottom
line would look like if Trumps Tweets weren't making headlines 3 times a week.

The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social
media space to figure out.

~~~
trs80
>Twitter loves Trump.

Hidden camera investigations[1] into Twitter employees suggest otherwise.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64gTjdUrDFQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64gTjdUrDFQ)

~~~
orf
Seems like a lot of out of context clips to push a narrative, standard project
veritas stuff.

Like the clip about banning certain groups of people: the engineer says "it's
going to ban a certain way of talking". You might take from this based on the
video that he's talking about inadvertently banning right-leaning users. Well,
what if he's talking about banning racism or messages that use ((subtle dog-
whistles)) instead of overt racism?

Also, not many people like Trump, especially not in left-leaning areas (like
where Twitter is based). Are employees not allowed to voice their dislike of a
very dislikable man, while drinking at a social event?

~~~
trs80
If you watched the whole thing you'd see the context of each interview.

~~~
orf
I did, and it's just longer out of context videos that cut off at convenient
points:

> Journalist: "Would you say the algorithms block liberal or conservative
> users?"

> Engineer: "I would say the majority of it are for Republicans, because they
> are all from Russia and wanted Trump to win"

> Journalist: "So you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?"

> Engineer: "Yes"

> Immediate cut.

Woah, what a compelling argument. The guy is saying they are using machine
learning to block Russian bots masquerading as American conservatives that are
influencing the narrative in favor of Trump (that totally don't exist btw
because we love Russia now and they would _never_ attempt to meddle in any
other countries elections). The video attempts to twist that into him saying
they block conservatives.

This study is an interesting read:
[http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-
partisansh...](http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisanship-
and-junk-news/)

And an associated news article:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/018/feb/06/sharing-
fa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/018/feb/06/sharing-fake-news-us-
rightwing-study-trump-university-of-oxford)

------
waytogo
Rediscovered Twitter for blockchain news.

Why: Subreddits for different tokens/currencies end up being echochambers (but
still good resources as long you follow multiple subs). HN rarely shows
blockchain stuff and the upvoted ones are often just anti crypto.

Following 30-50 crypto influencers on Twitter provides a good mix.

~~~
Shounak
Can you recommend some good crypto influencers to follow?

~~~
waytogo
A good while controversial start is Ian Balina @diaryofamademan (ICO heavy
content) and then just follow founders from various cryptos (Vitalik from
Ethereum, Jed from Stellar). Then just add all the people mentioned people
retweet.

------
timdellinger
Confession: when I open up twitter, the thing that excites me most is when I
see that patio11 has tweeted. His stuff is just an absolute must-read for me.
He uses twitter almost like a blog, which is different than most other people
I follow.

Some people use twitter like it's facebook, some people use it merely as a
pointer to other content, some people use it to argue, some people use it to
interact with major brands / corporations. I'm not sure if this is a strength
or a weakness of the platform.

I guess the important thing is that it's getting used.

~~~
patio11
_He uses twitter almost like a blog_

Yep, and I'm more than a little disappointed in myself about that. Something
about the form factor of writing there and the perceived "well it doesn't have
to be shippable, it's just twitter" quality bar lets me keep up a habit of
writing there almost daily while I struggle "sitting down to write essays"
even on a monthly basis.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Also, discoverability. Blogs have UI with mostly O(1) access to any article.
Twitter and Facebook are O(n) - the older a post, the more difficult is to
find it.

I like your tweets too, btw.

------
andy_ppp
I said a while back they were optimising their algorithm for rage and that The
Donald would be good for business. I think they are probably still buy because
I suspect they will be bought - such a feature of the Internet it is hard to
imagine a conversation, TV show or live event without it.

~~~
jdavis703
Are you active on Twitter? I'm not saying you're not, I'm just genuinely
curious on what other's filter bubble experience looks like. For me most of
what I see is related to state and local politics, and policy wonk issues. But
I've also managed to curate my feed. Except for when something really big
happens, my feed honestly does not feel to be full of rage. I wonder if your
interactions send some kind of signal to Twitter that rage Tweets are what
keep you most engaged?

------
grad_ml
Twitter is the world's news paper now. I think, as world newspaper, it is
worth it's value.

~~~
craftyguy
It's not a 'news paper', it's a street corner in medieval Europe lined with
'prophets' all spewing shit in an attempt to attract followers.

~~~
rhizome
Your comparison is inapt. One tweet in your timeline can not drown out other
tweets.

~~~
craftyguy
I never said that, nor do I think that was implied.

~~~
rhizome
You did. There is no concept of "volume" on Twitter in the way that a passerby
in Medieval Wherever would miss some information over other.

------
jxub
It's amazing how tech companies and unicorns are valued. If they are losing,
the public market or VC's cover their a __es and their value stays neutral,
and first signs of profit send the stocks to the moon.

That is also the behaviour of crypto, but in this case the stocks aren't
overvalued to start with, as decades of inflation have done to stocks.

Looking from another side, in crypto we haven't developed a sound investing
framework yet, other than the usual github/reddit/social/TA checks, possibly
because we are dealing with a protocol, not a product.

The interesting thing here, and maybe a somewhat contrarian position to take
in the Twitter case, is that they're not a tech company, but a _protocol_
company. And their value can't be measured with a number, they're essentially
playing the same field as TCP or IRC, which value we haven't measured.

I would be buying $TWTR stock, if it weren't for cryptos like VEN, GVT or REQ
which may be equivalent to investing in Twitter _in the seed phase_. Actually,
this line of thought is really interesting, I may write something longer and
more coherent about this stuff.

~~~
icedchai
How is Twitter a protocol company? Protocol implies open standards, like IRC
or SMTP... The only place I can tweet is Twitter.

~~~
wpietri
Agreed. Social companies like Facebook and Twitter started out with open APIs,
but closed them as they grew more successful precisely because they don't want
to be protocols.

I don't like that, but I get it. The money is in owning the user experience.
And it's hard enough to continuously improve your user experience when all the
people making that software work for one company. I think one of the reasons
email and IRC are losing out to things like Facebook and Slack is that it's
nearly impossible to make those things broadly better.

------
benaadams
Twitters advertising flow is messed up

Promote Tweet -> Give card details -> Lets see what can do and cost $

Should be

Promote Tweet -> Lets see what can do and cost $ -> Give card details

~~~
csomar
Are they able to check your card balance?

~~~
benaadams
No; but twitter will likely get a better conversion rate if they tell people
what it is they are buying and the cost, prior to handing over their payment
details

~~~
smogcutter
Seems like this way they filter out the looky-loos and narrow the gap between
seeing the price and making a purchase.

------
luso_brazilian
> Revenue in the recent period rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $731.6
> million, buoyed by data-licensing sales and video advertising.

I understand video advertising and if Twitter turns their attention to this
area (after dipping their toes on Vine and Periscope) Youtube and Twitch may
get a competitor. Now what does "data-licensing sales" means in this context?
User data?

~~~
pixelmonkey
Twitter acquired a company called Gnip back in 2014[1]. This company built a
SaaS business off licensing Twitter's firehose of tweets, in various forms, to
various industries. For example, my company, which provides real-time
web/content analytics to high-traffic websites, licenses Gnip's real-time API
of tweets so that we can do analytics on those tweets and embed them inside
our customer-facing products. That revenue ends up counted in Twitter's data
licensing sales. Other popular use cases include PR media monitoring systems
(e.g. Brandwatch), news alerting (e.g. Dataminr), and even finance (e.g.
Bloomberg licenses Twitter data for its terminal[2]).

I wrote about that data licensing business here:

[https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-
conundrum-8339eda1...](https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-
conundrum-8339eda162a4)

Even though Twitter isn't growing DAUs quickly (and possibly will never do
so), it is actually a pretty diversified business. It has a multi-hundred-
million ARR SaaS business embedded inside a multi-hundred-million user
consumer destination site, which primarily monetizes through a billion-dollar
self-service advertising business.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/twitter-acquires-
longtime-...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/twitter-acquires-longtime-
partner-and-social-data-analytics-provider-gnip/)

[2]: [https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/bloomberg-
twi...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/bloomberg-twitter-
data.html)

------
francescopnpn
I think the boost comes from ICO-related ads. Especially as Facebook just
banned them.

~~~
qume
Wow all these posts and youre the only person to mention this. I find that
really strange.

Of course twitter has just landed a dumptruck load of cryptocurrency ad
revenue.

Now the question is will they ban it for the same reasons facebook did given
how key it is to profitability?

~~~
francescopnpn
I highly doubt they will ban cryptocurrencies from their ad-platform when they
can barely stay afloat. I speculate Facebook did so only because they're under
pressure plus Zuckerberg said he's looking into the blockchain. I wouldn't be
surprised if they'll monetize Messenger or WhatsApp with (the speculation it
self of) a token in 2019/2020, akin to Telegram. Messaging-based apps are
notoriously hard to monetize and Zuckerberg has said on earning's calls that
he's unsatisfied with Messenger's progress in terms of monetization.

------
mark_l_watson
This seems fair, as a consumer. I follow a few very good computer scientists
and entrepreneurs on Twitter and the things they post are of high value to me.
I don’t mind the ads or the web app.

I favor reading books and academic papers over random web browsing, but some
time spent on Twitter, HN, and a few Reddit subs-Reddit’s keeps me up to date,
tech-news wise.

------
djhworld
I wonder if the premium tier of the API has contributed towards this?

~~~
walshemj
No just cut back on stock options aka a paycut for the staff.

~~~
adventured
A further quarter of a billion dollars in stock options per quarter is insane
when stacked against a $15-$20b market cap. Practically no sustaining public
companies operate like that, with that scale of constant dilution.

~~~
wpietri
It'll be interesting to see what that does to their hiring and retention,
though. They are competing for people with Facebook, Google, etc. They weren't
previously giving out those options to be nice.

~~~
walshemj
And instead of paper options they will have to increase real $ - part of the
problem for them is the way options are treated from an accounting perspective
when in fact not all options get exercised.

~~~
xxpor
So why not hand out RSUs instead?

~~~
wpietri
I think Twitter was actually already giving out RSUs, not options. But either
one dilutes the investor share of the company, which will push stock price
down.

~~~
walshemj
I think the problem is that appears on the accounts

------
icodemuch
So Twitter has finally given up on building for the avg person and begun
creating more tools to make life easier for advertisers (ie big money) and
they're suddenly more profitable. Shocker!!

~~~
wef883j
Revenue was up 2%. The rest is cost cutting.

[https://www.recode.net/2018/2/8/16991140/twitter-
profit-q4-2...](https://www.recode.net/2018/2/8/16991140/twitter-
profit-q4-2018-earnings-revenue-cuts)

------
sekou
This excellently shows the problem with how value is currently assessed in the
social media landscape. The "In case you missed it" algorithm-based
organization of tweets and the focus on video to "increase engagement" at any
cost are same reasons why there has been a widespread backlash against
Facebook. On the other hand, building your feed from the ground up granularly
is one of the larger differences between Twitter and Facebook.

~~~
Agathos
Whenever I see, "In case you missed it," I read it as, "Now you have to decide
if checking for new tweets is worth re-reading a half dozen tweets you've
already seen."

So far, the answer is usually yes. I follow a lot of good people and the fear
of missing something is real. But it's not 100% yes and I don't think the
trend line looks good for Twitter.

------
indescions_2018
Whisper rumor is that $TWTR is shopping itself for an acquisition. With $DIS /
FOX likely suitor. $30 stock price would place market cap approx $25B.

Twitter Could Easily Be Acquired In 2018

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4135256-twitter-easily-
acqu...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4135256-twitter-easily-
acquired-2018)

~~~
adventured
It's not a whisper rumor. That speculation has been extremely rampant for
years at this point.

~~~
mv4
Last time they were shopping, there was a huge influx of fake users, almost as
though all fraud detection checks were disabled.

This time is different, or is it. Just how much of their new revenue is due to
fake users, ad fraud, and automation?

~~~
adventured
They don't have any new revenue. Sales were only up 2%.

What changed is their expenses.

Negative $167m to positive $91m in net income, year over year for the quarter.
That's nearly entirely from adjusting their expenses down. Dorsey is turning
Twitter into the profit machine it should have always been by properly
adjusting its expenses to the size of the business (rather than the size they
hoped it would become years ago).

~~~
samfisher83
They are generating about 600 mil in free cash flow. Their revenues aren't
growing. Other than acquisition there is no way to justify a 24 billion dollar
valuation.

------
kapv89
Glad to see twitter doing good financially. Out of all the social media
platforms I use, it is by far the best.

------
kelukelugames
Oh good, I'm just down 17% on my TWTR holdings now.

------
imartin2k
Systematic outrage and Trump can be successfully monetized. Damn, I always had
the silent hope that Twitter wouldn't not reach this point.

------
jonbarker
Would love to see how they solve the problem of third party markets for
twitter followers.

------
lgleason
note that they slashed spending as well. Given all of the talk of regulation I
don't think they are out of the woods yet. If increased regulation does happen
it will have an enormous effect on the business.

------
sova
Bloomberg claiming they know why the stock rose. You could cite any reason

~~~
jonknee
Are you saying the giant move in the stock directly after they announced
earnings is not related to the earnings?

~~~
sova
It's always supply and demand, maybe demand rose as a result, or supply
decreased as a result, but to claim that an earnings report directly
correlates to valuation is like claiming that measuring the temperature of the
sea affects the water level.

------
perseusprime11
I will still stay away from it

~~~
majortennis
ive been in for some time, wish i bought more during the 50% off sale

