
Disney Considers Offer for Twitter - wslh
http://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-considers-offer-for-twitter-1474932191
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chatmasta
This would make a lot more sense than a tech company buying Twitter.

Twitter is, more than anything, a media company. It's a bit unfair they're
compared to tech companies in terms of performance.

Twitter is a cultural phenomenon more than a product. That's why I'm always
skeptical of people questioning its long term success. Unless another platform
emerges to replace it, its cultural momentum should be enough to sustain its
presence, even without profitability.

Maybe Twitter will never be individually profitable, but it has enough
cultural power for a large media company to justify subsidizing its costs with
profits from the overall income of a media empire.

As such, Twitter seems better off as a unit of a large media company like
Disney rather than a calculated profit center like Google or Facebook. Its
synergy with other products can make it a sustainable investment for a media
company.

Disney was one of the first companies to popularize Twitter, as ESPN and ABC
contributed to its early growth by bringing athlete and celebrity tweets into
the mainstream. The Disney media empire benefits from this synergy with
Twitter. It therefore makes sense for Disney to roll Twitter into its media
portfolio.

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f_allwein
Ok, but what exactly would Disney do with Twitter? How is it going to help
them conduct their business?

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logfromblammo
Every Disney media property cross-promotes every other Disney property.

If Disney buys Twitter, every star in their stable will likely be required to
tweet out a certain amount of content every day. Freshface McSongbird and
Heartthrob McCleancut will tweet about going to see Rogue One in theaters, for
instance.

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heroprotagonist
If that's all they want from it, then they don't need to buy Twitter to gain
the ability. Freshface McSongbird could be required to tweet without Disney
having any ownership stake in the company.

They could exploit the 'promoted tweets' more, but you could buy an awful lot
of promoted tweets for less than 20bn.

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knowtheory
Disney is a machine that monetizes fandom, and Twitter is pretty good about
fan communities (modulo the conversation about abuse).

The conversation about whether twitter will be successful at streaming live
content is interesting, but probably just one of those things that
demonstrates whether or not they have _further_ growth potential into other
spaces.

Twitter is already where lots of people go to talk about sporting events, news
as it's happening, shared experiences like TV watching, and so on.

To the extent to which Disney can get access to users in the throes of emotion
or facilitate deeper investment in their properties is probably useful for
Disney on its face, even before anything more is built on top of or into
twitter.

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jerf
"Disney is a machine that monetizes fandom, and Twitter is pretty good about
fan communities (modulo the conversation about abuse)."

I'd submit one of the ways in which Twitter is "pretty good" about fan
communities, by being relatively permissive about IP they don't particularly
care about, is precisely a way in which Disney is constitutionally incapable
of being. Disney has long been notorious for being very, very heavy on the
control side of its IP. Buying something because of a fan community that you
plan to essentially immediately squash is a rather silly acquisition.

"Relatively permissive" here doesn't even have to mean IP abuse (which Disney
_certainly_ would squash), but even things like expressing unfiltered negative
opinions. I just don't think Disney has the cultural DNA to deal with that in
a way that even remotely resembles Twitter.

~~~
knowtheory
What challenges does Twitter face that Disney doesn't already have to contend
with via ownership of or stakes in ABC News, ESPN or Vice?

Twitter doesn't host video of substantial duration or audio, and comment
threads everywhere are already the same mess (just at a different scale w/r/t
twitter).

~~~
jerf
I don't think any of ABC News, ESPN, or Vice provide free forums for people to
say whatever they want, do they? Twitter's more like blogspot or tumblr than a
news comment site. Taking something like blogspot and turning into something
highly regulated is a waste of everybody's time.

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AimHere
Twitter isn't exactly profitable at the moment (quite the reverse) and it's
pushed past it's coolest-kid-on-the-block stage of the internet platform
lifecycle.

I dunno about anybody else, but this gives me Myspace flashbacks - an
entrepreneur offloads his slightly over-the-hill social media platform to a
passing old media dinosaur in exchange for a ton of money, and leaves them
holding the bag throughout it's inevitable decline. With Dorsey's leverage as
a Disney board member, Twitter might be able to pressure or convince the
company into doing things it wouldn't otherwise do, if it was thinking
straight.

Maybe I'm wrong, of course, and Disney does have good plans for Twitter, but
there's a little alarm bell ringing here.

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influx
It would be trivial to make twitter profitable by laying off most of the
engineering team in San Francisco, and moving the ops teams to the folks who
run ESPN web properties.

Just keep the lights on, maintain the software and it would mint money.

~~~
jerf
Only for a brief time. As Twitter stood still and the rest of the ecosystem
moves on (and the biological metaphor is fairly apt here), all the other
things in the ecosystem would figure out how to eat Twitter's lunch. Twitter's
value (such as you may think it is) would depreciate fairly quickly in that
scenario. It's not a mint forever. It probably wouldn't even be a mint on the
timescale that, say, the Marvel cinematic universe has been and will be a
mint.

~~~
exstudent2
Twitter has been standing still for a really long time.

~~~
jerf
Only on the outside. Let it also stand still on the inside and the results
will be different.

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mkagenius
Why doesn't facebook buy Twitter? It aligns well with its mission, also helps
in establishing monopoly.

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askafriend
I just don't think Facebook sees $10-20B in value that it couldn't build
itself. Facebook's been building real-time Twitter-like features into it's
core product for a while now. They're features that the general public will
actually see/use compared to Twitter's niche active userbase.

For Disney/Google, it's $10-20B in value that they CAN'T capture themselves
and don't have the DNA to do so, so it's far more valuable for them at this
price.

If Twitter were $5B, then I have no doubt Facebook would try to snap (no pun
intended) them up.

~~~
choward
You don't purchase a software company purely for its product. You also
purchase the users and software engineers.

~~~
askafriend
I agree, and I think the users/team would be more beneficial to Disney and
Google than Facebook (which already has the DNA to build great social
products).

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mc32
I just hope this does not go the way of the go.com acquisition. Almost as good
as the AOL-Netscape tie-up.

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coldcode
Disney cannot afford Twitter at current valuation. It makes no sense, they
would more than double their LT debt, and it would provide no significant
income. At 10% of its current market cap (around 2B) Twitter would be a fair
deal. At the current value its a stupid purchase.

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ldayley
Keep in mind that Jack Dorsey is on the Board of Directors of Disney (whih is
mentioned in the article for those of you who tl;dr)

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bdavisx
Is Twitter a good place to work as an engineer? Does it have a great
engineering culture? Does Disney?

I'm just guessing here, but from the stories about how Disney did the whole
import H1B people and have current employees train them before firing -- it
doesn't sound like they (Disney) know how to treat software developers.

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gjolund
Twitter is desperate for anyone to take over their product and give them
direction.

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shmerl
I wonder if Disney would kill Twitter's patents disarmament policy if they buy
them.

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Grue3
Might as well say goodbye to all NSFW content then.

~~~
pjc50
And the political content. You might have a ""Twitter Revolution"" but you'll
never have a Disney one.

On the other hand, something might finally be done about the harassment of the
few remaining users.

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chatmasta
Disney owns ABC. I would hardly call it an apolitical company.

