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Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit
- samcheng 9y agoIt'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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- samstave 9y agoAnyone know if any Twitter execs (like Jack) have been donating to any Trump "foundations"?
- eradicatethots 9y agoThey’re very supportive of anti trump crowd on twitter. Could be a front, but I would expect them to be anti trump in general.
- rainythunder 9y agoYep, they're biased towards leftists.
- odiroot 9y agoI would expect the opposite.
- eroccatlun 9y agoImplying Trump uses the same shady "foundation" style bribery kick-back schemes as the people he uses his Twitter to slaughter daily.
- EvilTerran 9y agohttp://fortune.com/2016/09/12/trump-foundation-bondi-florida-ag/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/12/trump-foundation-bondi-florida...
- amigoingtodie 9y agoIf they are smart, they donate to both sides of the aisle.
- samstave 9y agoAlso, we know that twitter maintains "celebrity handlers" --- who is on the Trump handler team?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- c3534l 9y agoSomeone did a linguistic analysis and demonstrated that there are two writers of Trump's tweets. Trump's were all the crazy ones, his handler's were all of the moderate ones and the ones that walked back what was said previously.
- mesozoic 9y agoOr maybe the opposite?
- JohnTHaller 9y agoYou didn't even need to do that previously. Just hit the API and look if it originated on iOS or Android.
- krick 9y agoSo does Trump use Android or iOS?
- JohnTHaller 9y agoTrump had an Android phone while his handlers used iOS.
- huac 9y agothose are from a campaign staffer; twitter is not actually writing tweets for trump, or anyone else. a handler is somebody who makes the blue check feel comfortable on the platform, e.g. banning people who disagree with them
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoI can't find the article but an economist was estimating Trump's worth to Twitter at almost $2 billion. So I can't say I'm surprised; he is the single best thing that has happened for their company in YEARS.
- htormey 9y agoHere ya go: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-17/what-is-trump-worth-to-twitter-one-analyst-estimates-2-billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-17/what-is-t...
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoHa, yup I think that's what I originally read. Thanks!
- odammit 9y agoI’m curious if and how much stock he holds in it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- austinl 9y agoWorth noting that $2B is roughly 13% of Twitter's market cap. Fascinating to think how one person simply using your service is worth that much.
- King-Aaron 9y agoone person / leader of the supposed "free world".... same same
- ben_jones 9y agoI gave twitter another show about ~6 months ago. I enjoyed some feeds, most just felt like "fadspam" where people echoed popular opinion - particularly in tech. I really hated that as a new user I was immediately recommended to follow Trump. I get that algorithmically he's probably seen as a great person to follow, but I really, really, really, had no interest in doing so. But Twitter derives business value from recommending people follow Trump on their platform, so they'll keep doing that. Strikes me as selling out - would've preferred they not recommend any political leaders.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoTwitter is ALL ABOUT who you follow. I hated it for years, until a popular post here on HN a couple months ago. A user compiled an absolute SUPER LIST of the best people to follow, and now my feed is full of really interesting information, diverse viewpoints, and stuff I wouldn't find anywhere else. This one account was kind of the tipping point for me, finding GOOD TWITTER https://twitter.com/humanprogress https://twitter.com/humanprogress
- vermontdevil 9y agoWhere is this list?
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agohttps://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following Another great one from that list is @FermatsLibrary
- noir_lord 9y agoMy rule is never following more than 60. If I hit 60 it's one in one out and I have to think about which one to drop, that way I keep a feed that updates relatively slowly, is useful and full of content I actually am interested in. If you follow too many you loose far too much wheat in the chaff.
- perseusprime11 9y agoFully agree. Also, a good time for Jack to step fully into Twitter boat. Square is doing quite well, he can easily find somebody to run it. If he takes the fulltime role at twitter, expect the stock to go up another 20-30 %
- aaron-lebo 9y agoHonest question: why should Dorsey not be seen as an exaggerated media story (by the media and himself) and what has he done which justifies the stock jumping that high? He's run both companies for awhile now, Twitter has basically been stagnant. Doesn't he supposedly work like 80 hours a week anyway? It's already a full time job. Examples from 2011 and 2016: http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/13/technology/dorsey_techonomy/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/13/technology/dorsey_techonomy/... http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-explains-his-18-hour-workdays-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-explains-his-18-h... Here is he 5 years apart, marketing himself. So if he's actually working 80 hours a week, where are the results? What has Twitter done over the last seven years? He wants to have his cake and eat it, too, yeah?
- perseusprime11 9y agoTwitter was always making money. That was not their problem. Their big problem was spending 2 billion dollars. Cut spending and you will see net profit go up. He is atleast doing that while slowly starting to experiment with the product.
- WalterSear 9y ago"So if he's actually working 80 hours a week, where are the results?" And here I am, trying to find just one job in tech that's only 40 hours a week.
- JohnTHaller 9y agoIt's funny, but the 'Trump effect' is why myself and many I know use Twitter less, or at least only use it to interact on a micro level with friends/followers. Every trending topic is infested with so many Trump bots its just pointless to even engage.
- T2_t2 9y ago...and you are likely on the front line of new things, and as such less important for Twitter's long term strategy, even as you were likely a reason for their initial growth. That's the issue for SM sites like Twitter et al: going from early adopters to mass appeal. As much as some people hate Trump, his tweets likely got a lot of the 300 million non-SF, LA, NYC users involved. I might be off on user uptake, but the mainstreaming of Twitter is vital for their ad-based model, so anything that appeals beyond the liberal elites is going to be solid for their bottom line.
- JohnTHaller 9y agoBy bots I'm not talking about Trump fans who have Twitter accounts. I'm talking about actual bots. Huge networks of fake accounts with predictable combos of words for names based around Trump that solely post/retweet about Trump that only follow and are followed by 10s of thousands of similar accounts and use a specific schedule for hundreds and thousands of these tweets/retweets/likes. The kind of bots that take an innocuous trending topic like #WhatsUpWednesday and push 5 different anti-Hillary memes to the top of it. A full year after the election. And the 5 memes are the exact same ones they pushed to the top of a similar trending topic a month prior. It doesn't turn off 'liberal elites', it turns off anyone with a brain.
- T2_t2 9y ago> it turns off anyone with a brain. Exactly. So it has mass appeal :) That's the sad reality. The Kardasians aren't popular because of people with a brain. Mass appeal matters.
- 9y ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoAnd thus why he will never have violated the ToS. He could openly threaten to murder someone and Twitter would not suspend him. (Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.)
- bazoiks 9y agoDidn't they suspend Milo for suggesting a female actress was ugly?
- trumpownsyou420 9y agoprobaably, they are faggots.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mFixman 9y agoThey suspended Milo for posting faked Twitter screenshots to organize a racist witch hunt against a female actress.
- hk__2 9y ago> Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either They probably suspend a lot of people every single day, but we don’t notice it.
- markdown 9y agoThe spammers, yes.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- groby_b 9y agoThey mostly suspend minorities who are pissed enough to not politely say "no, thank you" to Trolls & Nazis sending them death threats. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
- hvmonk 9y agoYeah, i'd not be surprised if he holds TWTR stocks :)
- CodeCube 9y agoAre the president's holdings a matter of public record (I honestly don't know)?
- pcl 9y agoNo. Historically, modern presidents have made their holdings public and put their assets into a blind trust while they've been in office. However, this is not required of the President, and Trump has chosen to do neither so far.
- vonnik 9y agoYeah, 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.
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoThey should just make a bot like Microsoft and let it loose. Edit: - For the uninformed: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch... - Archives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tay_Tweets/top/?sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/Tay_Tweets/top/?sort=top&t=all
- wolco 9y agoThat is what passes for entertainment these days. Who do you thinking is following the feeds? Who is watching the cnn warrooms? The general public is rooting for or against whatever they believe.
- Danihan 9y agoWhat an ignorant comment. Who has Trump committed genocide on? Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?
- travmatt 9y ago>Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house? Seb Gorka
- Danihan 9y agohttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/19/donald-trump-aide-sebastian-gorka-denies-claims-has-links-hungarian/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/19/donald-trump-aide... >Mr Gorka denied any anti-Semitism in his family. >He said his father had protected Jewish boys wearing yellow stars on the way to school as a child. When Communists took power, he supplied information to MI6 before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned (possibly betrayed by Kim Philby). He arrived in the UK after escaping during the 1956 uprising. How exactly is that "self-proclaimed" when he is denying it.
- zghst 9y agoSuch a shockingly bizarre statement, however the cold hard truth!
- ifhd 9y agoThe news still loved Twitter regardless. You can write an "article" just by going "look what twitter says" The public in general, not so much.
- VVayneTracker 9y agoAgreed. I wonder how much of that money is from strawman purchases that can't be traced directly to russia yet. When the dust finally settles on all this we'll see that twitter received millions from russian surrogates.
- SyneRyder 9y agoThere's already a news report from RT today claiming that Twitter actively courted them (RT) for advertising during the elections, and have published a Keynote slide deck from a presentation they claim Twitter presented to them: https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-rt/ https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-r... They claim that in return for $1.5m upfront spend during the elections, Twitter would promote Russia Today's tweets and provide them with an inhouse team to curate content and provide strategy. For $500K extra, Twitter would promote RT's moments to 60 Million users. There was an offer for a $3.3m total ad spend. But it should be pointed out that would not feed into this quarter's revenues, as it was for late 2016. And the story all depends on whether you believe the slide deck from RT is genuine or not. (There's a separate HN discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566663 )
- vacri 9y ago> As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news. What are you talking about? Before Trump was a thing, Twitter was routinely mentioned in the news. It was the lazy source of react quotes: "Today, X tragedy happened in town Y. 'UnrelatedPerson' on twitter said 'what a tragedy'". The name is more prominent now, sure, but it already was routinely reported in the news.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoThese days though, Twitter is the news. It's now "Today, Trump said X about Y on Twitter".
- cyberpunk0 9y agoMore and more these social media platforms feel like scheme's. Round after round of funding without ever reaching profitablity
- QAPereo 9y agoIs that really only occurring to poeple here, now?!
- jastanton 9y agoGeneral reminder to be courteous, especially when people learn something new: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- model_m_warrior 9y agoTech is full of school marms now. Thats how we know its mainstream.
- dang 9y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that as much as you've been. In case it helps: I don't give a fig about being a schoolmarm, nor does anyone else who works on HN. What we care about is having a web forum that isn't quite at the bottom of the barrel. The downward pressure thither is so overwhelming that unless we do specific things to counteract it, and maintain them constantly, that's where we all end up. That's bad, not because Miss Manners doesn't approve, but because it's boring.
- QAPereo 9y agoI’ve adapted my tone to the forum in question, but it’s true that I need to work on making my manner more robotic and increasing overall passive aggression, thanks!
- dang 9y ago
- ProAm 9y agoThey 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
- dntrkv 9y agoAnd you came up with that number, how? Do you have in-depth knowledge of what their staff makeup looks like? If you don't, how do you even begin to think about making such an absurd statement. You are saying that Twitter can continue to do what they do if they fired 3 out of 4 employees. You know what, you should propose this to their leadership, I'm sure they haven't thought of this great idea.
- ceejayoz 9y agoI'd fully expect many of those 4,000 to be sales staff, each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed.
- adventured 9y agoTwitter was massively overstaffed before they began to meaningfully grow sales. It goes back to the days of their faster user growth when they were anticipating competing with Facebook and having over a billion users. They built the company ahead of time for that outcome rather than restraining employee growth and focusing on profitability. They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.
- Top19 9y agoSales Departments have way too many people. I like that they employ people, but that’s a separate conversation. On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even. The other 6, usually because of poor sales territory luck, sell maybe half their salary worth of services, but since growth is everything, an employee who makes 100k but only sells 50k is considered valuable.
- nharada 9y ago"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?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoWhy trust their answer anyway? If this concerns you, you should switch to Mastodon.
- aantix 9y agoMastodon looks promising. It definitely has traction.
- cpeterso 9y ago"ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies, which could help to break its reliance on advertising for revenue." i.e. "we don't know how to profit from this user data ourselves, so we'll sell it to people who know how."
- derefr 9y agoMore like, “we’ve analyzed our data to death and know it’s not worth beans, but we don’t have to tell anyone else that, and there’s a sucker born every minute who thinks they can beat the stock market by squinting at this-or-that data firehose just right, so we’re happy to charge them for the attempt.”
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- randomblob 9y agoAlso: What data is being bought? Publicly available information bundled up so there's not hassle with gathering it would be ok IMO. Private data would spark my interest as well. They can't be selling DMs, can't they?
- komali2 9y ago>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?"
- wutwutwutwut 9y agoAnd users activates, users logged on last X months, users not deleted, no duplicates caused by some obscure event synchronization issue etc etc. Bugs are easy.
- yellowbeard 9y agoMonthly actives is generally the primary metric and it's not so easy to calculate.
- baddox 9y agoDo 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 9y agoCalculating these metrics at scale is not trivial.
- Dylan16807 9y agoIn 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 9y ago
- sha256link 9y agoI think blockchain will help us with this.
- ellerybangs 9y agoTwitter 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 9y agoI 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"
- mb53 9y agoTwitter is pretty popular in South Korea
- gigatexal 9y agoI 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.
- perseusprime11 9y agoCan 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 9y agoMark 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.
- pascalxus 9y agoBy 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 9y agoautomate what exactly?
- PatientTrades 9y ago> 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 9y agoWhen 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)
- datavirtue 9y agoTwitter, 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.
- throwaway0255 9y agoHow do you propose we identify companies that fit that criteria, and take ownership and control of them away from the people who created them? And remember, your proposal can't be a greater danger to society than the problem you're trying to fix, or that would defeat the purpose.
- mi100hael 9y agoYay, Socialism!
- willitpamp573 9y agoWho is gonna pay to host the open distributed platform? Surely not the users
- bigphishy 9y agoI 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.
- umeshunni 9y ago"Please Read: A Personal Appeal From <open distributed platform> Founder" a la Wikipedia
- egypturnash 9y ago
- misterHN 9y agoTwitter is subverting the USA, and Trump is as well, by normalizing Twitter use. The punishment for subversion is summary execution because a subverter is assumed to be a traitor. Trump is a traitor, he should be shot immediately for subversion, and the heroes who shot him should be celebrated and enjoy a great triumph of liberating the people of America from Twitter. Liberation means death to those who tolerate the degradation and mental contagion that is Twitter, a disgusting pit of hatred and barbaric behavior. Trump is not just a stupid jerk, he is a stupid jerk who needs to be shot for subverting the USA, stat. Letting these monsters live is stupid. You want to be stupid? You want to tolerate a security force that protects a stupid traitor? That’s what Trump is: a stupid traitor. He wants to pretend it is OK to be a stupid jerk and tell the American people he is an incompetent moron every day. No, it is subversive behavior and it earns you the title of TRAITOR. TRUMP IS A TRAITOR.
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- hiram112 9y agoRegardless 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.
- iLemming 9y agoMaybe 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 9y agoCurious to know what about their app you don't like?
- likelynew 9y agoI think twitter found its source for profit: inflammatory politics.