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By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success. 300 million people find their service useful. But it was already huge success when it had no business model. M
by edbaskerville 10y ago
By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success. 300 million people find their service useful.
But it was already huge success when it had no business model. Moreover, what is fundamentally valuable about Twitter to its users--sharing and discovering little bits of textual expression over a publicly visible social network--is not very expensive.
From the perspective of the users who find it valuable, why does it need a for-profit model at all? Why can't we just subsidize it as a non-profit via grants and donations, a la Wikipedia? I'm pretty sure you could do the important thing that Twitter does--ignoring all the extras devoted to figuring out how to extract more money from the data--at a small fraction of its $2 billion in revenue.
I'm not being naive here--it's quite obvious why things are the way they are. But there many examples out there of making a big impact while making a decent living (just without anyone trying to become a billionaire). Social networking is ripe for more of this approach. The attempts so far have failed not because of their business model, but because of the usual reason: poor execution.
- Avshalom 10y ago>>By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success Revenue - Cost is perhaps the most normal metric
- edbaskerville 10y ago>> By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success > Revenue - Cost is perhaps the most normal metric Badly chosen phrase. I'm not saying that currently Twitter is not a business failure--it is, at the moment. But from the perspective of providing value to many people, it's doing very well. Plus, the cost part of the equation is driven at this point largely by trying to figure out how to make more money, not by continuing to provide a valuable service to users. (The making-more-money thing is obviously not working yet.) The alternative model is: lower costs drastically by focusing on doing a handful of useful things well. And then you might be able to raise the money to cover those costs the way Wikipedia does.
- hackaflocka 10y agoLook up "app.net". It's been tried. It failed.
- TheAceOfHearts 10y agoOut of those 300 million monthly active users, I wonder how many are actually people. As far as I can tell, Twitter still has a big problem with bots.