
Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit - gbugniot
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-results/twitter-says-could-turn-first-ever-profit-shares-jump-idUSKBN1CV1JP
======
samcheng
It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been
a savior for Twitter.

Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the
public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into
irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned
in national news.

~~~
vonnik
Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a
genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's
balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their
stock goes up, the market should dive.

~~~
Danihan
What an ignorant comment. Who has Trump committed genocide on? Who is a self-
proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?

~~~
kbhn
> Who has Trump committed genocide on?

Genocidal doesn't necessarily mean he's committed genocide; it means that he's
prone to (and to some extent, fascinated by) mass acts of killing. The tweets
about promising fire and fury on an entire nation of people (North Korea),
telling Fox that we need to kill the terrorist families as well, etc. He gets
off feeling like he's the most powerful man in the world.

He's a strongman, whose solutions often involve labeling entire categories of
people as bad/evil (Muslims, Mexicans, the media). If you haven't noticed this
you're either not paying attention or willfully ignorant.

~~~
ImSkeptical
Threatening a country that is threatening us isn't exactly genocidal. Killing
families of terrorists is deeply immoral and murderous - but it's also in
keeping with current U.S. policy (see Anwar al-Awlaki - both Trump and Obama
administrations have killed Awlaki's children). Terrorists aren't a race
though, so wanting to kill them and their families isn't genocide.

~~~
craftyguy
Don't confuse yourself. It's not the millions of people El Cheeto would kill
in a nuclear strike on DPRK that are threatening the US, it is effectively one
trump-like individual in charge of DPRK that is threatening the US.

~~~
marcoperaza
Government has consequences. That's why democracy is so important. This is
especially true with regards to foreign policy. If a country threatens another
such that the threatened country's only viable defense is to attack the
civilians of the aggressor, that would be a totally legitimate tactic of war.

Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack
on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North
Koreans, since North Korean artillery is spread widely throughout the southern
part of the country. That is tragic, and no small part of why we've allowed
this madness to go on for so long. But at some point a people must protect
their security, and do what must be done.

~~~
craftyguy
> That's why democracy is so important

Too bad there is not a true democracy in the US.

> Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter
> attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent
> North Koreans,

How about we concentrate on their leadership, instead of 'spraying and
praying'?

~~~
marcoperaza
That's not so easy. Decapitating the regime, even if we could reliably kill
all the key officials, does not necessarily prevent a lengthy barrage of
artillery on South Korea.

------
nharada
"may become profitable for the first time next quarter after ... ramping up
deals to sell its data to other companies"

Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?

~~~
stingraycharles
They’ve acquired the company Gnip a few years ago, which then became the
exclusive reseller of Twitter firehose data.

Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with
Facebook and Linkedin.

There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social
media analytics companies to investment firms.

~~~
bayonetz
When they bought GNIP they ended their partnership with DataSift. It was a
major blow to DataSift. It was a shrewd move on Twitter's part. My company
switched over to using GNIP and our DataSift sales rep told us tons of other
customers switched too and that he was leaving because of it.

~~~
stingraycharles
Yep, that’s correct. The recent lawsuit against LinkedIn about crawling [1] is
interesting, though. It sets the precedent that third parties cannot be
blocked from crawling, which technically means anyone could do this with
Twitter as well.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-
linked...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linkedin-
third-party-data-access-judge-ruling)

------
komali2
>San Francisco-based Twitter also disclosed that it had discovered an error in
how it had measured its user base since 2014 and revised its estimates
downward

How is this possible? They can't just do like fetch_all_users, filtered by
"not banned?"

~~~
yellowbeard
Monthly actives is generally the primary metric and it's not so easy to
calculate.

~~~
baddox
Do you mean it’s not easy to _define_? It shouldn’t be difficult to calculate
any particular metric going forward, but it’s inportant to define what it
means to be “active.”

~~~
lotso
Calculating these metrics at scale is not trivial.

~~~
Dylan16807
In real time, yes.

But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups
into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an
analysis server should be easy.

Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function
of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in
chunks.

~~~
squarecog
I helped build Twitter's data platform, 2010-2016.

There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a
"user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way
that would be done for smaller businesses.

By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's
not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active
users, and for high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably
user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object
updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some
"last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.

That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark /
distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's
not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate
counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.

Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such
as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios
that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward
definitions would surprise you.

@baddox nailed it.

~~~
Dylan16807
Thanks. Note that I wasn't trying to guess at what twitter does, just to
provide a workflow that _should_ be viable almost anywhere, in the absence of
easier options. It's good to hear that the underlying idea of " _calculating_
the metric isn't the hard part" is true.

------
datavirtue
Twitter, like FaceBook, should be an open, distributed platform. They are too
valuable to remain under the control of a person or small group of people.
They are communities and their value slides, and danger to society increases,
when they are under centralized control.

~~~
willitpamp573
Who is gonna pay to host the open distributed platform? Surely not the users

~~~
bigphishy
I don't have any figures, let's just 5 servers running containerized
environments, with a couple of decent uplinks, it is feasible to handle
bandwidth of a million users for a few thousand a month.

With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no
funding or IPO's needed...

In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc.
) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.

------
hiram112
Regardless of my thoughts on Twitter as a product, I'm glad they're profitable
and might be around for a while.

They've released a lot of good open source software - their Scala stuff is
great, and it seems like the company allows and even encourages their
engineers to not only open up their code, but also gives them the time to
document and help the community.

------
PatientTrades
> and ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies

Which companies are buying this data? Considering its estimated that a third
(1/3) of twitter activity is from bots retweeting, liking, and following. Not
sure how much real value there actually is in this data. Twitter may turn a
profit, but there are bigger issues with their model

------
FilterSweep
When Hacker News top threads does all the overinflation talk for you

2.Twitter says could turn first-ever profit, shares jump (reuters.com)

3.Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years (nytimes.com)

------
pascalxus
By now, couldn't they just automate everything and lay off 90% of the staff? I
bet that would make it profitable. I'd like to see their cost structure.

~~~
ryancouto
automate what exactly?

------
cyberpunk0
More and more these social media platforms feel like scheme's. Round after
round of funding without ever reaching profitablity

~~~
oaijdsfoaijsf
There's always the option to simply not invest. For those platforms still in a
pre-IPO state, you probably _can 't_ invest, even if you want to. For Twitter,
it's easy enough to not buy the stock, and, indeed, if you bought in Jan 2014,
you probably wish you hadn't. But if you bought yesterday, you're probably
happy enough right now.

~~~
notyourwork
> But if you bought yesterday, you're probably happy enough right now.

Get out while you can enjoy a profit.

------
gigatexal
I know it's the huge growth story that wallstreet seeks but it's an invaluable
resource, Twitter is. It should be bought by one of the big 5 tech firms if
just to keep it alive in the public interest.

~~~
wolco
It should be part of the big 5 or that was the thinking 5 years ago.

------
perseusprime11
Can I also say one more thing without getting downvoted? A good reason why
their stock is rallying today is also because of their ban on Russian Ad
dollars going forward. Something that Mark could not do at Facebook.

~~~
mv4
Mark made much more, and would never release that. He chose to very publicly
implement various fake news detection tools instead.

This one here was a token gesture, a rounding error.

------
ProAm
They would be profitable in an instant if they'd get rid of half their
employees? Im not sure why they need SO many people for Twitter. I believe
they have over 4000, they could easily get by with 1000

~~~
a13n
Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large
corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation.
Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

~~~
ProAm
But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality
show presidential candidate and _might_ have their first profitable moment
after 10 years of existence.

Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the
years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be
operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is
stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for
someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.

~~~
hobofan
"Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that
it will destroy our future profitability"

Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had
to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-
term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due
to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you
alive.

~~~
bm1362
I think SoundCloud's downfall would be it's huge investment into record label
deals, it's paywalling to support said deals and then the lack of adoption for
it's subscription service for access to those label's music.

Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's
actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.

Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big
contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.

------
iLemming
Maybe they finally fix their crappiest android app. Or open api for third-
party developers, because obviously Twitter doesn't know shit about designing
apps.

~~~
sarath_a
Curious to know what about their app you don't like?

------
likelynew
I think twitter found its source for profit: inflammatory politics.

------
mb53
Twitter is pretty popular in South Korea

------
ellerybangs
Twitter just posted that it has inflated its user values for the past 3 years
and lied to constituents, and now there stock price has risen. Why aren't more
investors fleeing from these companies? It seems endemic that social media
platforms are not just lacking in transparency, but completely trying to
obfuscate it for profit.

------
kowdermeister
I predict some headlines:

"Twitter is in funding crisis now making revenue as a remedy"

"The tables have turned, Twitter now making money, what's next?"

"Twitter demonstrated first profit, VC-s are in shock"

"Twitter in decline, first profit is below expected after 11 years"

"A profitable Twitter is considered harmful"

