9 ms·

Agreed on poor finances. But Twitter has one thing that no one else has - they are in the center of the zeitgeist. Every political candidate is on Twitter. Ever

by briholt 10y ago

Agreed on poor finances. But Twitter has one thing that no one else has - they are in the center of the zeitgeist. Every political candidate is on Twitter. Every news network discusses Twitter happenings everyday. NFL broadcasts list players' Twitter handles. Half the commercials on TV advertise hashtags. South Park just did a whole episode about Twitter. The cost to embed your brand in the minds of Americans like that would be far greater than $10B. The question is can some larger company capitalize on that mindshare.

pc86 10y ago
There are plenty of people who use Facebook and don't use Twitter. Facebook is certainly more ubiquitous, it's just not quite as easy to tell you where someone's FB page is the way you can just have "@BarackObama" in the ticker.
- allemagne 10y ago
  A (somewhat less significant) number of people use Twitter and not Facebook. Facebook seems to have a reputation of being more ubiquitous, yet creepier than Twitter.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    It's a lot more than "somewhat" less significant.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
orblivion 10y ago
Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is sponsored by large tech companies.
- abc_lisper 10y ago
  No shit! They should charge companies and news agencies, and anyone representing companies per tweet(1k per tweet or similar). They provide a valuable service - why should they give it to corporations for free?
  - mkagenius 10y ago
    fb doesn't do that. Twitter can follow what fb does. Right now twitter is very light weight, un-cluttered. It can change UI/UX to advertise more. Of-course there has to be value for advertisers as well - which I think is there (350M users).
    - abc_lisper 10y ago
      Yeah. Twitter is a broadcasting platform. It is different from FB. FB feed has your mom and their friends' posts. Twitter doesn't, unless you explicitly ask for it. Not everything should be about advertising. Twitter can stay as it has, and just charge people with money, money.
      - gaius 10y ago
        The feeds of both are whatever the algo thinks - which will be some compromise between what you want and what the owner of the algo wants.
        tkxxx7 10y ago
        What is algorithm-driven in my twitter feed? The 'While you were away' stuff at the top? Other than that, as far as I know it's always been a chronological feed of whoever I want.
        gaius 10y ago
        Are you sure? http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marketing/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marke... If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...
smhinsey 10y ago
The way that Twitter has become so pervasive despite not really solving the profitability problem makes me think of how a lot of the original constructors of skyscrapers end up building icons and then losing their shirts and being forced to sell it to someone who ultimately sees it realize the initial promise.
imagist 10y ago
> The cost to embed your brand in the minds of Americans like that would be far greater than $10B. Just because something costs money doesn't mean it's valuable. Being at the center of the zeitgeist definitely seems like it would be profitable, but de facto it hasn't been for 10 years, so it probably just isn't. Being in the center of the zeitgeist isn't a substitute for making a profit.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
serge2k 10y ago
And yet they still can't make money. They aren't growing either.
skewart 10y ago
This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not necessarily something anyone would want to pay a lot of money for. How would anyone monetize it? Twitter can't really control how many non-users see a tweet.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  Maybe popular tweets inline with and advertisers brand could be sponsored; "@jonwhoever from Colorado tweets 'I have never had such a popular tweet about the mobile phone industry' brought to you by blackberry". I'm only slightly not serious about this :-)
- panarky 10y ago
  Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 80% of the shit while keeping 80% of the good stuff, Twitter will simultaneously shrink their costs while growing revenues to become a sustainable business. With this model, Twitter is a $1 billion per year profitable business [2] with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. [3] Improve the signal-to-noise ratio and Twitter becomes THE place to be for all kinds of communities. That means a return to growth and higher rates per 1000 tweets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law [2] Start with 200 billion tweets per year. 90% are shit, and 80% of these go away, leaving 36 billion shitty tweets. 10% are good, and 80% of these stay, leaving 16 billion good tweets. 52 billion tweets in total, monetized at $20 per thousand is a billion bucks a year. [3] Signal-to-noise ratio before is 1:9, after it's 1:2.
  - nowprovision 10y ago
gordon_freeman 10y ago
and people like Elon Musk and Tim Cook are on Twitter. It's incredibly interesting to read what they do and say day-to-day. I'd call myself a passive user because I only read notification on my phone if few of these people tweet something.
freyir 10y ago
Harambe's at the center of the zeitgeist. You wouldn't invest in Harambe.
hdctambien 10y ago
You could say all the same things about AOL and AOL Keywords 18 years ago...
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  You really couldn't. Yes, people who were online recognized AOL keywords the way they do URLs today, but it never had the pervasiveness that Twitter does. News channels show tweets and hashtags. A large fraction of news shows up on Twitter before it hits other sources of news. It's the platform for putting up a smoke signal, a firsthand account, or a story as it develops. (None of which inherently makes it profitable.)

by briholt 10y ago

pc86 10y ago

There are plenty of people who use Facebook and don't use Twitter. Facebook is certainly more ubiquitous, it's just not quite as easy to tell you where someone's FB page is the way you can just have "@BarackObama" in the ticker.

allemagne 10y ago
A (somewhat less significant) number of people use Twitter and not Facebook. Facebook seems to have a reputation of being more ubiquitous, yet creepier than Twitter.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  It's a lot more than "somewhat" less significant.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

orblivion 10y ago

Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is sponsored by large tech companies.

abc_lisper 10y ago
No shit! They should charge companies and news agencies, and anyone representing companies per tweet(1k per tweet or similar). They provide a valuable service - why should they give it to corporations for free?
- mkagenius 10y ago
  fb doesn't do that. Twitter can follow what fb does. Right now twitter is very light weight, un-cluttered. It can change UI/UX to advertise more. Of-course there has to be value for advertisers as well - which I think is there (350M users).
  - abc_lisper 10y ago
    Yeah. Twitter is a broadcasting platform. It is different from FB. FB feed has your mom and their friends' posts. Twitter doesn't, unless you explicitly ask for it. Not everything should be about advertising. Twitter can stay as it has, and just charge people with money, money.
    - gaius 10y ago
      The feeds of both are whatever the algo thinks - which will be some compromise between what you want and what the owner of the algo wants.
      - tkxxx7 10y ago
        What is algorithm-driven in my twitter feed? The 'While you were away' stuff at the top? Other than that, as far as I know it's always been a chronological feed of whoever I want.
        gaius 10y ago
        Are you sure? http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marketing/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marke... If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...

smhinsey 10y ago

The way that Twitter has become so pervasive despite not really solving the profitability problem makes me think of how a lot of the original constructors of skyscrapers end up building icons and then losing their shirts and being forced to sell it to someone who ultimately sees it realize the initial promise.

imagist 10y ago

> The cost to embed your brand in the minds of Americans like that would be far greater than $10B. Just because something costs money doesn't mean it's valuable. Being at the center of the zeitgeist definitely seems like it would be profitable, but de facto it hasn't been for 10 years, so it probably just isn't. Being in the center of the zeitgeist isn't a substitute for making a profit.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

serge2k 10y ago

And yet they still can't make money. They aren't growing either.

skewart 10y ago

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not necessarily something anyone would want to pay a lot of money for. How would anyone monetize it? Twitter can't really control how many non-users see a tweet.

andy_ppp 10y ago
Maybe popular tweets inline with and advertisers brand could be sponsored; "@jonwhoever from Colorado tweets 'I have never had such a popular tweet about the mobile phone industry' brought to you by blackberry". I'm only slightly not serious about this :-)
panarky 10y ago
Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 80% of the shit while keeping 80% of the good stuff, Twitter will simultaneously shrink their costs while growing revenues to become a sustainable business. With this model, Twitter is a $1 billion per year profitable business [2] with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. [3] Improve the signal-to-noise ratio and Twitter becomes THE place to be for all kinds of communities. That means a return to growth and higher rates per 1000 tweets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law [2] Start with 200 billion tweets per year. 90% are shit, and 80% of these go away, leaving 36 billion shitty tweets. 10% are good, and 80% of these stay, leaving 16 billion good tweets. 52 billion tweets in total, monetized at $20 per thousand is a billion bucks a year. [3] Signal-to-noise ratio before is 1:9, after it's 1:2.
- nowprovision 10y ago

gordon_freeman 10y ago

and people like Elon Musk and Tim Cook are on Twitter. It's incredibly interesting to read what they do and say day-to-day. I'd call myself a passive user because I only read notification on my phone if few of these people tweet something.

freyir 10y ago

Harambe's at the center of the zeitgeist. You wouldn't invest in Harambe.

hdctambien 10y ago

You could say all the same things about AOL and AOL Keywords 18 years ago...

JoshTriplett 10y ago
You really couldn't. Yes, people who were online recognized AOL keywords the way they do URLs today, but it never had the pervasiveness that Twitter does. News channels show tweets and hashtags. A large fraction of news shows up on Twitter before it hits other sources of news. It's the platform for putting up a smoke signal, a firsthand account, or a story as it develops. (None of which inherently makes it profitable.)