
Twitter's User Problem: Fastest Gains Are People That Don't See Ads - prostoalex
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/twitters-user-problem-fastest-gains-are-people-that-dont-see-ads-1406924973-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwMTEwNDEyWj
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latitude
Twitter should really allow advertising to _your existing following_.

I have an account for one of my projects that I use to announce new releases
and updates. This happens once every few weeks, so I would pay for an option
to stick my tweet at the top of my followers' feeds for, say, a week. If
Twitter would then also allow people to unstick a tweet after reading it (or
opt out of sticked tweets altogether), I think it'd be a great and _welcome_
feature to have for everyone involved - TWTR gets paid, I get more eyes on my
tweet and others won't miss my updates, which is what they followed me for to
begin with.

~~~
frostmatthew
> If Twitter would then also allow people to unstick a tweet after reading it

I really like your idea of a stickied tweet but they should probably
automatically unstick it once you've seen it.

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sp332
There isn't really a way for Twitter to know if you've seen it if you don't
interact with it in some way.

~~~
frostmatthew
Of course there is (that's how they're calculating the impressions figure in
your analytics).

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sp332
How the heck does twitter know if I looked at a particular tweet?

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frostmatthew
They know when it's displayed to you. Let's say that Bob follows Sally (and a
bunch of other people)

* Sally makes a tweet at 8AM

* Bob doesn't check Twitter until noon

* Bob doesn't scroll down, the tweet at the bottom of the screen is timestamped 11:30AM

In this scenario Twitter never displays Sally's tweet in Bob's timeline. It is
thus _not_ an impression. If Bob had scrolled down to see tweets going back to
8AM Twitter would display Sally's tweet in Bob's timeline, this would count as
an impression.

If you're asking if they know that you actually read, parsed, comprehended, or
contemplated the text of the tweet then no of course not. Likewise somebody
clicking on a link doesn't mean they actually read, parsed, comprehended, or
contemplated that content.

~~~
sp332
Of course, and that's how ad impressions are counted. But that doesn't help me
as a user, and advertisers pay much less for "impressions" than for an ad that
is interacted with in some way. So that's worse for everyone than an ad that
you click to dismiss.

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gdudeman
This is sort of a silly problem since Twitter started at 100% off-Twitter and
has exceeded all predictions at bringing people into their own experience.

There are numerous, straightforward solutions to this. Twitter can require
third party apps to show ads, for instance. Twitter can continue to copy
functionality from third party apps and then squeeze them down. Or Twitter can
worry about this once they are monetizing the bulk of their user base at 99%
of the potential.

I think this is genuinely a challenge for Twitter to solve, but I suspect
(hope!) internally they spend much more time worrying about getting more
users, how to meaningfully innovate and how to make Twitter more essential for
the majority of their "sometimes" users.

~~~
pogue
The only trouble is that Twitter seems to be taking the opposite approach and
blocking third party clients from functioning all together.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2011/03/twitte...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2011/03/twitter-tells-third-party-devs-to-stop-making-twitter-
client-apps/) [http://mashable.com/2012/08/16/twitter-api-big-
changes/](http://mashable.com/2012/08/16/twitter-api-big-changes/)

~~~
tomjen3
Not just do they put severe limits on how many users you can get, they also
have strict limits on how you are allowed to display the tweets (most
importantly you are not allowed to merge feeds from different social networks
into the timeline) which means I can't make the app that I wanted (which would
take all the users accounts and merge them together).

Their ability to do this, incidentally, is why I hate oAuth.

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cj
On another note, as an advertiser on Twitter I'm surprised that I'm not
allowed to create ads to be displayed to users in countries like India,
Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Turkey,
Italy, Ukraine, Argentina, Poland, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Belgium, Greece,
and all lesser populated countries.

Since Twitter removed the option to create ads that target users worldwide,
it's impossible to create a campaign that displays ads to users in less
populous countries.

Has Twitter made a deliberate decision to not monetize their "long tail"
foreign users?

~~~
goblin89
> as an advertiser on Twitter I'm surprised that I'm not allowed to create ads
> to be displayed to users in countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia,
> Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Ukraine, Argentina,
> Poland, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Belgium, Greece, and all lesser populated
> countries.

Yet rest (or don't) assured that users in at least couple of those countries
do observe promoted tweets, pinned here and there in their timelines.
Apparently there is a way.

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mark_l_watson
In general I have a feeling of unease using "free" services, but it is nice to
not have to pay for what I think services are worth (e.g., I would value Gmail
at $8/month, Google+ at $3/month, Twitter at $2/month, Facebook at $3/month,
Blogger at $5/month).

One real value of Twitter, Google+, and Facebook is the quality of what people
you are following post. The other (and larger for me) value is promoting my
blog. Every time I write a new blog entry, I shamelessly promote it on social
media.

This is probably a crazy idea, but I wouldn't mind if these services had
"hybrid" paid services: Pay a relatively small monthly or yearly fee, still
see just a few advertisements, but much fewer advertisements than the free
versions that are more geared to my interests than those advertisements that
might make more money for the companies providing the series.

~~~
pyvpx
you are an extreme minority, statistically and financially.

~~~
hyperbovine
Why? Paying for the products you used was the dominant way of doing business
for the last 5000 - 15 years of human history.

~~~
GhotiFish
Fortunately for businesses that existed those last 5000 - 15 years, copying a
document wasn't free. Information couldn't be mass produced at a scale that
renders the notion of supply meaningless.

Businesses now have to compete with open source or decentralized services that
cut them out. When money enters the equation, people immediately start
shopping, they start asking "Is this an expense that is necessary?"

That plus the amount of uncertainty john q public has on transmitting money
online (a reticence I share to be honest), makes paying small fees a large
barrier to entry.

Besides, if I've learned anything, I've learned that just because you paid a
company money, doesn't mean they won't turn around and sell you up the river.
The barriers of trust for a service that's free and non-free are exactly the
same.

~~~
hyperbovine
> Fortunately for businesses that existed those last 5000 - 15 years, copying
> a document wasn't free. Information couldn't be mass produced at a scale
> that renders the notion of supply meaningless.

Google and Facebook are not in the document copying business. They index,
curate, store and generally make information easy to access. That's a real
service which costs real money to offer, and is not going to be just
spontaneously overtaken by some FOSS equivalent (whatever that even means).
And they could charge real money for it, if they wanted. Personally I would
welcome that opportunity if it meant they would treat me more like a customer
and less like an ad demographic.

~~~
GhotiFish
There are distributed social networking systems that have being experimented
with. HN has stories showing off a few of them. Facebook has real competition
from people who don't have data aggregation or advertisement agendas.

Barriers to entry for these tools are: the technical expertise to setup and
run the programs (which is low low low, but still enough), and the obvious
lack of users to give the system meaning.

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ASneakyFox
If the official Twitter app wasn't so bad I would use it. Twitters problem for
me is how hard it is to browse its content. Its website has the same problem.
I think they need to look more in to how people want to use their service. I'm
sure its different for different kind of users. Eg some one following
celebrities vs some one folllowing businessses vs some one following politics

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plg
Is there any reason why we can't design a federated (non-centralized) version
of twitter that doesn't depend on a business model of monetization? Every ad I
see on twitter contributes to (what I assume is) my eventual abandonment of
the service.

~~~
ef4
There's no fundamental reason. I think the internet swings back and forth
between periods of openness and periods of walled gardens. We're in a walled
garden period. My gut says it won't last forever.

Our current walled gardens succeeded by refining the user experience of the
open web they supplanted. They made it easy for normal users to do the things
that only advanced users were able to do before: easily publish your own
stream of content, find other people's content you care about, aggregate other
people's content, and then let everybody generate new content that references
the previous content.

None of that is new functionality, but Facebook and Twitter fixed the user
experience and taught normal people how to do all of that.

But now that the bar has been raised and the average user groks the benefits
of "social networking", there's nothing to stop the technology from eventually
being commoditized.

As for business models, a decentralized competitor doesn't actually need a
business model, because their infrastructural costs could be zero. "HTTP"
doesn't have or need a business model.

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timerickson
Twitter… consider this: The 3rd-party experiences are simply better than your
native ones, and not because of their lack of ads. Additionally, your own
Tweetdeck and (seemingly abandoned) Twitter for Mac don't display ads.

~~~
pogue
Twitter's support for Twitter power users, like those who use Tweetdeck has
been abysmal. After buying it out, they turned off a bunch of great features
the original client had and now rarely issue any updates. I assume they are
trying to drive visitors to use the 'official' Twitter site, but it just
doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

No Tweetdeck user views ads, even though Twitter owns and operates the
software. The only alternative for PC users is Hootsuite, and it is browser
based. For anyone who wants to have multiple columns open at the same time or
have notifications of direct messages or @replies, Tweetdeck is (essentially)
the only game in town.

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rythie
I'd happily pay for the ability to use third party clients & no advertising on
the main site. Anyone who doesn't want to pay can still use official apps and
the website with ads. To me that would be a better solution than just slow
killing all the third party apps for everyone.

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RexRollman
Personally, I don't use Twitter anymore because I don't care for many of the
changes they have made. I'm not talking about the advertising but the UI
changes that is too busy. And the last time I created an account, Twitter had
greatly complicated its settings, not to mention constantly badgering me to
follow people.

Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr all followed the same path: nice, functional
interfaces that were needlessly complicated over time.

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erikb
Well, if Instagram is making money from Twitter users, why is Twitter not
asking Instagram for a share? It's a quite straight forward idea and I don't
see why there should be a problem. If so many people share from Instagram to
Twitter then certainly Instagram wouldn't have a problem paying for the API,
right?

~~~
icebraining
And what if they refuse? Is Twitter going to block their links? Sounds like a
bad PR move to me.

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eps
I am guessing Twitter doesn't yet see 3rd party clients not showing ads as a
big issue, because if it were, they would've shoveled them anyway through a
simple T&C change. For larger client developers it'd be an offer they could
not refuse, because they are as dependent on T for their revenue as it gets.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Twitter's Users' Problem: Deliberately locking themselves into a monopoly
waiting to be abused.

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brianbreslin
It looks like this would imply the next phase will be twitter either killing
off third party apps for good (seems like their MO) or creating a federated ad
network to insert into these third party streams (they should have done this 4
years ago).

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aaronbrethorst
Shrug. 'Real' native ads forthcoming, I guess. Or more API restrictions. Or
both.

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stevengg
maybe its not the best idea to have a business model based on misclicks.

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dools
I see promoted tweets and I use Hootsuite ...

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humility
Twitter's User Problem: No smart people at helm!

