

How Twitter Found Its Money Mojo - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-twitter-found-its-money-mojo-1d170e3df985

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walterbell
Kudos to Weil on selling the board a business model, media format and
engineering roadmap which aligned the interests of readers and advertisers.
The article didn't mention that readers can block sponsors, which is a
valuable signal to advertisers (quality) and Twitter (relevance).

Hopefully Twitter continues to show every tweet sent by people you follow,
carving out their own path far away from Facebook's "algorithmic" decimation
of organic traffic.

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codingdave
Until they are in the black, large revenue numbers in and of themselves don't
count as "money mojo". Heck, I'll match their financial performance right now.
I'll take 1.375 billion in funding and happily return 1.325 billion right back
to my investors, with a lot less trouble than twitter has gone through. Any
takers?

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kaonashi
I suppose if you find there to be no value to the Twitter service itself, that
might be a fair proposition.

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baddox
If you can declare that a company has "found money mojo" based on your
valuation of the company, then you can declare if for essentially any company,
and certainly any company that has raised money recently.

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dougmccune
The thing that's absolutely crazy to me is that Twitter is able to _spend_ so
much money. They're going to pull in nearly a billion and a half dollars in a
single year and still be able to spend it all plus some? It sounds like nearly
half of revenue is spent on stock compensation to employees. Holy shit, no
wonder the housing market in SF is going nuts right now.

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danols
The day Twitter introduces an algorithmic tweet feed is a sad day.
Unfortunately I think it will come.

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walterbell
Why do you think it will come? Promoted tweets can already be repositioned
within the feed, there is no need to annoy users by deleting tweets that they
_want_ to read, that will simply reduce attention available for advertisers.

Why would Twitter throw away the user goodwill and financial success earned
from a multi-year rollout of promoted tweets, by settling for a simplistic
pay-to-play protection scheme to extract money from advertisers?

The OP article explains in detail how Weil has focused on targeting to improve
relevance and engagement. Such targeting depends on data, which depends on an
_explicit interest graph_. It would make no sense for Twitter to destroy the
asset that provides signal to the ad biz.

