7 ms·

The price reflects the future prospects of Twitter, and a poorly-monetised Twitter with a shrinking user base is worth less than a poorly-monetised Twitter with

by bonaldi 11y ago

The price reflects the future prospects of Twitter, and a poorly-monetised Twitter with a shrinking user base is worth less than a poorly-monetised Twitter with a booming user base. Put another way, they used to be hosting a huge party and just had to work out how to turn that into cash. Now people are starting to leave the party, making cash less of a concern at that point.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Seems like they (and a lot of SV) need to figure out ways to monetize other than ads.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  I can tell you the easy answer to that problem: micropayments. Look how much people will spend on Android apps when they're a dollar or three. Make things really cheap, and people will buy them: they'll do a lot of impulse purchases when things are cheap enough. If news articles only showed you part of the article, and then demanded $0.02 to read the rest, I could see a lot of people paying that. Considering how little they get paid for ad impressions (fractions of a cent), direct payments like that would be more profitable, and readers wouldn't care that much about spending pocket change on it. But there's no way to make a functioning micropayment system currently. It's not feasible to have credit-card payments for sub-$1 transactions because of the high per-transaction fees, and Visa/MC have a cartel going where you have to use them for any kind of credit/debit payments. SV needs to figure out how to make easy, low-fee micropayments a reality, and then we'll see some change.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    Any intermediary will face the issue of having user deposit an advance payment so micropayments can happen. Unless one has balls enough to factor in debt in micropayments. You sign up users and make them agree to pay those .02 at a later time and when you're down five dollars the usets need to pay to continue. It's risky but with enough margin to cover the insolvents it could work
    - abraae 11y ago
      great plan! Allegedly a Facebook user is worth $128 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/07/youre-worth-128-on-facebook-sorry-about-that-linkedin-drop/#68e47ffa3aa0 http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/07/youre-wo...). Paying $5 to acquire a micropayment customer sounds cheap.
      - mistermann 11y ago
        > Wall Street right now is valuing the average Facebook user at $128 , a touch ahead of Twitter’s $118 — and far above LinkedIn’s skimpy $84. Wow, I would say Twitter and Linkedin are vastly overvalued compared to Facebook.
        Ntrails 11y ago
        Really? I mean, linkedin has a legit monetisation strategy just as a socially connected CV platform for recruiters to find people - and charging recruiters for tools to use it effectively. That seems far far stronger than what I know of twitter. Facebook - well what I really want to know is more detailed metrics like median time spent on it per user, interactions per user, etc etc. I'd be fascinated to know if the trends are downwards.
        Grishnakh 11y ago
        Agreed. Facebook's entire monetization strategy seems to be just showing ads to people who waste their time there looking at stupid videos and posting stupid comments to them. That's pretty easily defeated with an ad-blocker. LinkedIn's strategy is, as you said, a socially-connected CV platform so that recruiters can find people and hook them up with jobs, and make a big commission in the process, so LinkedIn charges recruiters a hefty fee for access to people. Ad-blockers aren't going to have any effect here: the recruiters still have to pay to send messages to people. It seems like a much more sound business strategy, as long as professionals still need jobs and there's recruiters looking to place them in jobs. It might not have the mass appeal of the inanity of Facebook or Twitter (since only a fraction of the population is of the demographic that would find it worthwhile to use LinkedIn; someone working as a barista or a Walmart cashier would not), but it certainly isn't subject to the same fickleness that those two are. All it'll take is some other inane social media platform to rise up for people to share dumb videos on and for FB/Twitter to do something dumb to piss off people, and suddenly they could become the next MySpace. LinkedIn's position is much stronger, as long as they don't screw it up trying to achieve the popularity of those other two.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    I would gladly pay a premium if they'd add some fricking features to Twitter and TweetDeck, and I bet I'm not the only one. Just one example, I'd like in TweetDeck to have more visualization options, as well as powerful filtering capability. I get a tweet about every 30 seconds and I would like to have the capability to have some of those go into a "must read later" bucket. That would take a good developer 2 to 8 weeks, lots of people would use it and love it and likely be happy to pay for it, Twitter has all sorts of developers and money, but how often do they release features that are useful? Instead we get some sort of "important" (according to their algorithm if I'm not mistaken) tweets abomination. Hey I'm not saying these are necessarily awesome ideas, but if your ship is showing signs of starting to sink, doing crazy things like adding features to your product may not be all that crazy.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    And who are the assholes who down-modded me anyway? There's nothing controversial or offensive here. People have been wanting micropayments for many, many years now on the internet for the exact reasons I states above. Are there some Visa/MasterCard shills here or something?
x0x0 11y ago
The more users you have the more you can demand advertisers work with you to implement custom ad units or ad types. Since twitter seems to be focusing on promoted tweets and other twitter-only advertising methods, you really need a lot of scale to justify advertisers building custom creative for you.
diab0lic 11y ago
I think this pretty much nails the wall street perspective. Interestingly enough I left the party because their attempts to monetize were really invasive; Emails, many notifications on my phone, etc... I think some subset of their users (to which I belonged) appreciated the simplicity of the product. Their attempts to increase engagement decreased it with what appears to be a significant portion of their user base.
- jeremy_k 11y ago
  Interesting. I receive no emails and rarely any push notifications from Twitter. I use it every day while riding the bus, although I'm mainly a consumer and hardly tweet anymore. Did you and I fall into different categories or something and somehow that led to you receiving invasive marketing where as all I ever see are a few promoted tweets? Pretty curious about this because you mention that your experience is happening to a large portion of the user base.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Twitter was pushing text from people I didn't follow to my phone's lock screen. Only visit occasionally now.
    - jonlucc 11y ago
      Their Android widget used to show the latest tweet of a person a follow. Recently (few months, maybe?) it was only the most recent ad. I'll be damned if I dedicate a chunk of my home screen to whatever crappy ad Twitter wants to fling at me.
  - diab0lic 11y ago
    I used to receive multiple push notifications a day at a minimum, which was irritating to me because prior to this a push notification meant that someone was interacting with me, and that didn't hold true anymore. Twitter had broken that implicit contract with me. As for what I had said in the parent comment, what I was trying to imply was that something has happened recently that has disengaged a significant (different than large portion, specifically meaning not insignificant) portion of its user base as evidenced by the deceleration in user growth. Apologies for any confusion. :)
devishard 11y ago
That's entirely perception with no basis in reality. A million users who make you $10 each are worth the same as 10 users who make you $1 million each. It's worth it for Twitter and its investors to track users so they can see how to monetize them, but if revenue goes up its okay. If making money ever isn't the main goal of a business, that truly are screwed. That said, I've long believed that Twitter would be one of the first to fail when the tech bubble pops. They don't have a product people are willing to pay for.

by bonaldi 11y ago

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago

Seems like they (and a lot of SV) need to figure out ways to monetize other than ads.

Grishnakh 11y ago
I can tell you the easy answer to that problem: micropayments. Look how much people will spend on Android apps when they're a dollar or three. Make things really cheap, and people will buy them: they'll do a lot of impulse purchases when things are cheap enough. If news articles only showed you part of the article, and then demanded $0.02 to read the rest, I could see a lot of people paying that. Considering how little they get paid for ad impressions (fractions of a cent), direct payments like that would be more profitable, and readers wouldn't care that much about spending pocket change on it. But there's no way to make a functioning micropayment system currently. It's not feasible to have credit-card payments for sub-$1 transactions because of the high per-transaction fees, and Visa/MC have a cartel going where you have to use them for any kind of credit/debit payments. SV needs to figure out how to make easy, low-fee micropayments a reality, and then we'll see some change.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  Any intermediary will face the issue of having user deposit an advance payment so micropayments can happen. Unless one has balls enough to factor in debt in micropayments. You sign up users and make them agree to pay those .02 at a later time and when you're down five dollars the usets need to pay to continue. It's risky but with enough margin to cover the insolvents it could work
  - abraae 11y ago
    great plan! Allegedly a Facebook user is worth $128 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/07/youre-worth-128-on-facebook-sorry-about-that-linkedin-drop/#68e47ffa3aa0 http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/07/youre-wo...). Paying $5 to acquire a micropayment customer sounds cheap.
    - mistermann 11y ago
      > Wall Street right now is valuing the average Facebook user at $128 , a touch ahead of Twitter’s $118 — and far above LinkedIn’s skimpy $84. Wow, I would say Twitter and Linkedin are vastly overvalued compared to Facebook.
      - Ntrails 11y ago
        Really? I mean, linkedin has a legit monetisation strategy just as a socially connected CV platform for recruiters to find people - and charging recruiters for tools to use it effectively. That seems far far stronger than what I know of twitter. Facebook - well what I really want to know is more detailed metrics like median time spent on it per user, interactions per user, etc etc. I'd be fascinated to know if the trends are downwards.
        Grishnakh 11y ago
        Agreed. Facebook's entire monetization strategy seems to be just showing ads to people who waste their time there looking at stupid videos and posting stupid comments to them. That's pretty easily defeated with an ad-blocker. LinkedIn's strategy is, as you said, a socially-connected CV platform so that recruiters can find people and hook them up with jobs, and make a big commission in the process, so LinkedIn charges recruiters a hefty fee for access to people. Ad-blockers aren't going to have any effect here: the recruiters still have to pay to send messages to people. It seems like a much more sound business strategy, as long as professionals still need jobs and there's recruiters looking to place them in jobs. It might not have the mass appeal of the inanity of Facebook or Twitter (since only a fraction of the population is of the demographic that would find it worthwhile to use LinkedIn; someone working as a barista or a Walmart cashier would not), but it certainly isn't subject to the same fickleness that those two are. All it'll take is some other inane social media platform to rise up for people to share dumb videos on and for FB/Twitter to do something dumb to piss off people, and suddenly they could become the next MySpace. LinkedIn's position is much stronger, as long as they don't screw it up trying to achieve the popularity of those other two.
- mistermann 11y ago
  I would gladly pay a premium if they'd add some fricking features to Twitter and TweetDeck, and I bet I'm not the only one. Just one example, I'd like in TweetDeck to have more visualization options, as well as powerful filtering capability. I get a tweet about every 30 seconds and I would like to have the capability to have some of those go into a "must read later" bucket. That would take a good developer 2 to 8 weeks, lots of people would use it and love it and likely be happy to pay for it, Twitter has all sorts of developers and money, but how often do they release features that are useful? Instead we get some sort of "important" (according to their algorithm if I'm not mistaken) tweets abomination. Hey I'm not saying these are necessarily awesome ideas, but if your ship is showing signs of starting to sink, doing crazy things like adding features to your product may not be all that crazy.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  And who are the assholes who down-modded me anyway? There's nothing controversial or offensive here. People have been wanting micropayments for many, many years now on the internet for the exact reasons I states above. Are there some Visa/MasterCard shills here or something?

x0x0 11y ago

The more users you have the more you can demand advertisers work with you to implement custom ad units or ad types. Since twitter seems to be focusing on promoted tweets and other twitter-only advertising methods, you really need a lot of scale to justify advertisers building custom creative for you.

diab0lic 11y ago

I think this pretty much nails the wall street perspective. Interestingly enough I left the party because their attempts to monetize were really invasive; Emails, many notifications on my phone, etc... I think some subset of their users (to which I belonged) appreciated the simplicity of the product. Their attempts to increase engagement decreased it with what appears to be a significant portion of their user base.

jeremy_k 11y ago
Interesting. I receive no emails and rarely any push notifications from Twitter. I use it every day while riding the bus, although I'm mainly a consumer and hardly tweet anymore. Did you and I fall into different categories or something and somehow that led to you receiving invasive marketing where as all I ever see are a few promoted tweets? Pretty curious about this because you mention that your experience is happening to a large portion of the user base.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Twitter was pushing text from people I didn't follow to my phone's lock screen. Only visit occasionally now.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    Their Android widget used to show the latest tweet of a person a follow. Recently (few months, maybe?) it was only the most recent ad. I'll be damned if I dedicate a chunk of my home screen to whatever crappy ad Twitter wants to fling at me.
- diab0lic 11y ago
  I used to receive multiple push notifications a day at a minimum, which was irritating to me because prior to this a push notification meant that someone was interacting with me, and that didn't hold true anymore. Twitter had broken that implicit contract with me. As for what I had said in the parent comment, what I was trying to imply was that something has happened recently that has disengaged a significant (different than large portion, specifically meaning not insignificant) portion of its user base as evidenced by the deceleration in user growth. Apologies for any confusion. :)

devishard 11y ago

That's entirely perception with no basis in reality. A million users who make you $10 each are worth the same as 10 users who make you $1 million each. It's worth it for Twitter and its investors to track users so they can see how to monetize them, but if revenue goes up its okay. If making money ever isn't the main goal of a business, that truly are screwed. That said, I've long believed that Twitter would be one of the first to fail when the tech bubble pops. They don't have a product people are willing to pay for.