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Twitter has a new CEO – what about a new business model?

205 points by oedmarap 5y ago

gandutraveler 5y ago
I use Twitter is to get the latest pulse in real time for any event (news story, episode). I hope they retain that. Problem with highly curated feeds like FB, LinkedIn is that it doesn't give you the the current snapshot and hence I don't even trust it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with (because people would have found it valuable enough to pay for in the first place). In some ways, Twitter has the "news" problem in that people just aren't willing to pay for it. As this says, Internet advertising really isn't that effective, especially on a site that is the equivalent of standing in town square with a megaphone. I think Twitter is tapped out on how much money it can make and drastic changes will just drive users to other places. If you're looking for higher returns a different company might be a better idea.
- TheTrotters 5y ago
  What kind of logic is this? Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported. Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye. Most media companies started with ad-supported websites and plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model.
  - rp1 5y ago
    You’re ignoring the competitive landscape. You might pay for Google, but a lot of people would choose to use a free alternative if they needed to pay. The loss in users would give Google less data and make Google less effective as a search engine.
    - TheTrotters 5y ago
      You’re absolutely right about Google but, I think, it’s not necessarily true for Twitter. Their social graph is so important that it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone. And everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.
      - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        > it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone True, but they may leave microblogging behind altogether rather than pay. Twitter just isn't that valuable. Then again, I deleted my accounts four or five years ago.
      - syshum 5y ago
        >>everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem. If this were true we would not have a long long list of defunct once popular platforms where people used to be, but moved away from in mass after poor decisions by the platform operators. To believe twitter is immune to the digg, myspace, etc effect is hubris not backed by reality
        TheTrotters 5y ago
        That’s of course a fair point. But there are key differences. Twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world. People’s careers and influence are built partly on their follower count and who those followers are. Key users post under their real name. Digg and MySpace were very different from that.
        syshum 5y ago
        >>twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world I think this is over stated, Twitter is used to amplify, or bring attention to some announcment, event, or other communication but twitter itself is not the communication channel, it simply links to the communication channel which is often another platform (youtube as an example) or a website, or some other communication type. Twitter is advertising, be it paid ads, or the "politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics " advertising their own work directing people off twitter to consume more of that work Personally I have found very little value and very little substantive communications coming out of twitter, in fact the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme accounts not to find actual information or news
  - OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
    > Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported. I don't think that's true, because they would charge for access and have ads. These are fairly rare. >Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye. Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads. >plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model That's not really true, you have massive consolation because their business model is nonviable any other way.
    - TheTrotters 5y ago
      > Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads. They make money from ads… which people see when they use search. Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled. Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing. But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible. EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.
      - OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
        > Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. This logic is backwards. Having a large userbase allows them to sell ads in the first place to the user base that won't pay for the service in the first place. Pretty much every large tech website has a building phase where they make no money and sell no ads while building a user base large enough to start selling ads. None of the large web companies today have charged to use their product and at this point it's unlikely they could. >But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible. Which is a terrible argument written by someone who doesn't understand the market. It's like saying no one will move away from AIM in 1999. Yes, people will. There are lots of historical examples, including the Digg to Reddit exodus. Even Facebook itself has had the problem of users migrating away from Facebook. Facebook has literally bought companies where users have migrated to (Instagram/WhatsApp). > EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. Virtually none. No one was paying for TweetDeck and now it's part of Twitter. Consumers aren't using HootSuite or Sprout Social, they target businesses. Going down the Android list most Twitter apps are free, the few that cost anything have small install bases (Fenix 2 <100k purchases, Talon for Twitter is ~ 100k purchases). Twitter has an daily active users of over 300 million users. So maybe 0.1% are willing to pay a one time fee for a client? I don't think Twitter can do much with that. Virtually no one,on a consumer level, is willing to pay for a messaging service. WhatsApp (one-to-one) is free, Facebook is free (broadcast), Instagram is free, Snapchat is free, YouTube is free, TikTok is free, Skype is free, Zoom is free (to individuals), Google Chat is free, SMS/MMS/RCS usage is free (depending on how you look at the service cost). On a business level you can extract payments (think Slack), but on a consumer level, messaging has no value people are will to pay (so it's ad supported instead).
- paulcole 5y ago
  The amount of money I’m willing to spend on jeans, electronics, etc. is much higher than the amount I’m willing to spend on Twitter. Makes sense that a service can sell ads for more money than I’m willing to pay for the service.
- nindalf 5y ago
  > If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with Twitter doesn’t cost $0 because no one thinks it’s worth paying for (demand side), it’s because if they did charge they’d be replaced by someone who didn’t (too much potential supply).
  - OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
    If there was a market of people who would pay for such an app, there would be one on the market to satisfy the demand for it. Supply is irrelevant if there is no demand for it in the first place. Even taking this assertion, it means there is effectively infinite supply so Twitter's service has effectively no monetary value to the consumer. It's still impossible to charge a consumer for it then (and the costs to provide the service have to be paid by a 3rd party in ads). Edit: It's very difficult to build a network and get to a critical mass like Twitter. I'm still arguing it's demand constrained (people unwilling to pay) because you would see more viable competitors if it were supply.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  They could also boost profits by lowering their OpEx. I genuinely don’t know why they need to spend a billion dollars a quarter for a product that really doesn’t change that much and isn’t massively complex.
  - sulam 5y ago
    What counts as complex? Is Facebook complex? Google? How about Netflix? By the measure of “I can explain how they work in a blog post” none of these are complex. But trust me, operating internet scale services is complex, regardless of how simple they seem from the outside.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    It would be fascinating to see their engineering backlog.
throwaway4good 5y ago
Chat with the crypto bros ... they've got some ideas ...
gvv 5y ago
I'm curious what will happen to Twitter's stance on BTC and crypto in general, given recent favorable developments.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  New guy is drinking at least as much kool-aid as the old guy, so crypto bullshit will continue to burn the world and user goodwill.
  - z3rgl1ng 5y ago
    +1
  - nasseri 5y ago
    When will people like you begin to realize how foolish you sound?
    - sremani 5y ago
      I wish crypto people HODL-ed their opinions.
      - nasseri 5y ago
        Are you familiar with the phrase "laughing all the way to the bank"?
        pjc50 5y ago
        But you're your own bank. So you're just laughing at yourself.
        nasseri 5y ago
        Lol this was pretty good I have to admit.
        5y ago
mherdeg 5y ago
My favorite options for Twitter to make money are * Early access to tweets -- send an API call with Elon Musk's latest tweets 1000ms before they are public to algorithmic traders for $1M/month * Blue checkmark next to profile pictures that OpenSea verifies you own
- rp1 5y ago
  How would the second idea make money?
  - mherdeg 5y ago
    Maybe only some images get flagged with the metadata that say that they work with Twitter, and OpenSea pays Twitter a 10% cut of any works-with-Twitter image rights they sell?
  - detaro 5y ago
    make it only available to accounts that pay for it. Could work with that crowd. (or make it a paid thing on the seller side, pay to opt an offered series of pieces in). But probably overall not that much money to be had.
  - everly 5y ago
    If a user has already spent money purchasing an NFT that they want to use as their profile picture, they will almost certainly spend a bit more for proof of ownership.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Elon would then instanly cease twitting on order not to alienate his fanbase.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Or undercut Twitter by selling folks access to his tweets 2000ms before they hit the API. His fanbase would eat that up.
lekevicius 5y ago
The question is, which aspect is monetized: reading or writing? If it's reading, then I see Twitter quickly losing out to a platform that is free to read. Politicians and celebrities wouldn't make announcements on a platform that requires payment to read. If it's writing / having an account, then the suggestion is a lot more reasonable. I would pay $4/mo, and would be very glad to not have spam comments below every tweet I read.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Twitter is a first-responder medium. If people had to pay we'd miss so many breaking events that make it valuable to journalists et al in the first place. That model would work for a newsletter , but not for a live medium
- barkerja 5y ago
  They already have a subscription model for this: Twitter Blue https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introducing-twitter-blue https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci... It enhances the experience on Twitter for those that desire more features: a thread feature (which is /really/ nice IMHO), ability to cancel tweets after send, more color themes and customizable icons, etc. The Twitter "as we know it" will likely always remain free and ad-driven, but if you want an enhanced experience, you're going to have to pay for it. And that's fine by me.
  - ryanmcbride 5y ago
    I'd buy twitter blue right now if it didn't still have ads. I'd pay 3 times its cost if it was just ad free. Sure it's not a problem on my computer because I have adblock but I primarily use twitter on my phone, and I'm too lazy to set up an adblocking DNS like pihole.
    - lekevicius 5y ago
      You can try to use a third-party client like Tweetbot. They don't have ads.
- 5y ago
chrismorgan 5y ago
> Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. I’d even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month. (I’m mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I’m basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and people’s commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either way it improves the world!
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  The very reason why much of the internet is financed by advertising money is because users do not in fact want to pay a subscription.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.
  - pram 5y ago
    This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
    - 5y ago
12xo 5y ago
Charge accounts with 100k followers $100 a week. 1m 1000 a week. If they don't pay, they don't have the followers and cannot prove their own business/brand. These are the people who NEED Twitter. Make them pay for the right to access the audience like every other media.
zhdc1 5y ago
This reminds me of when everyone found out during the dot com bubble that Booking.com[1], at the time a unicorn startup, was run out of a single office with something like a dozen or so employees. It didn't lead to the stock market crash, but it always stuck me as the first time that the general public started to really think that the whole dot com scene was a little out of whack. Twitter has a monopoly and 3B+ in revenue. It's hard to see how this justifies a 36B+ market cap. It's in a much better position than many, many other unicorns. [1] I'm going off of a twenty two or twenty three year old memory, so I may have gotten the company wrong.
- karatinversion 5y ago
  ...Twitter has a monopoly?
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    On what they do? Absolutely. If you combine all of the different 'social media' platforms together into a single category? No.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      What is it that Twitter does exactly? It mostly seems to exist to put out short one-to-many messages that other media organizations can then cite as Zeitgeist. That may not be a monopoly, but it certainly isn't benevolent to the user, and it isn't how it was billed when it was new.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        > What is it that Twitter does exactly? Break news and sic mobs on people. Both activities many people are extremely interested in being a part of.
    - 5y ago
cblconfederate 5y ago
Maybe twitter can't make (more) money. Email or Instant messagers don't make money, but they are essential protocols. I think any change to its free model will instantly change its character so much that it will lose relevance and drive people to simpler open source solutions.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > Maybe twitter can't make money. They had 3.7B in revenue last year. They're doing ok.
glintik 5y ago
New business model from me - $0.01 per post/comment, $1 - per hating post/comment. Make world happy again!
- klyrs 5y ago
  Don't silence dissent, just charge for it? This is the dystopia that scifi taught me to expect..
mythrwy 5y ago
Maybe they could charge people $1 to label other's posts as fake news. And $1 to remove one vote that a post is fake news. Capitalize on the flame wars. Ya, it won't make the world a better place but does Twitter do that now?
cletus 5y ago
A better title might be: How to Kill Twitter With This One Trick (Paid Access) Twitter is IMHO only a communication platform for celebrities and brands. This is <0.1% of the user base. For most people, your Tweets are even less noteworthy than Youtube comments. What users use Twitter for seems to be three things: 1. As a de facto notifications platform; 2. As a news feed aggregator. This then means consuming content off platform; and 3. "Voting" on content you agree or disagree with. Ultimately this is what liking and retweeing really is: no different to liking a Youtube video. That's all it does. Users are famously unwilling to part with even small sums of money for Internet services. Twitter seems no different here.
streamofdigits 5y ago
Maybe the global newspaper folk, who seem to be the most serious users of the platform, should form a joint venture, buy up twitter, disseminate microblogging news (ad)free and simply use the embedded links to drive traffic to their web platforms (for subscriptions and more in-depth news coverage). So twitter becomes a sort of neutral preview / public announcement forum, like a kiosk with folded newspapers on the street: you can see the headlines, but you need to buy to read. Alternatively, they could do the same from scratch without twitter... The problem is not what happens to twitter. The problem is how to have healthy, representative, inquisitive journalism
- riffic 5y ago
  There's absolutely nothing stopping a consortium of news outlets from adopting the W3C recommendation ActivityPub to push out microposts directly from their own content management systems, with an existing audience open web audience.
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    that is in principle possible (essentially replace twitter by RSS aggregator clients) but is not exactly equivalent: for example some entities could microblog on "next-gen twitter" without having a website and there is also the question of reactions from readers to posts (whether those are seen centrally by all users) that centralization and processing of responses is by-and-large part of the social media problem (both generating the twitterstorm dynamic and having spawned the shadowy "sentiment" industry) but I suspect a lot of addicted users are quite keen to keep it going
tinyhouse 5y ago
Twitter need better relevancy. Their ads are some of the worse I've seen on any platform. The other thing they need, as pointed in the article, is other streams of revenue. Like LinkedIn for example. They sell a premium subscription to a small subsets of overall users (Twitter Blue is trying to do the same), have a successful job board, etc. The article mentions Twitter is making money of selling data. That's a good stream of revenue but they can do much better. I doubt the new CEO would make a big difference though. I think it's a bigger management issue than just replacing the CEO. We'll see how things turn out. So to respond to the original article by Ben Thompson, I don't think it makes sense to charge all users, but it does make a lot of sense to charge a subset of the users. People (companies) who use twitter for marketing for example.
danguson 5y ago
I have read from an article that they will enable NFT-based profile pictures in the near future, I wonder how will the new CEO act on this feature.
robofanatic 5y ago
dont know if twitter charges $$ to people with large number of followers. that would be a good way to make money.
riffic 5y ago
I've proposed a business model for a while for Twitter: take their software and whitelabel it for institutions, media, or whoever's big enough to own their own domain name and wants to have their own @namespace @example.com this would be a good fit for large media sites (journalism twitter is huge), government, businesses. let them pay. examples of this being expressed here by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654
- gargron 5y ago
  You are describing Mastodon [1] [1]: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
  - riffic 5y ago
    hah, yes in a way I am. edit: Eugen, you can steal this business model from Twitter if they don't want to play in this space. Run Mastodon-as-a-service and sell it to institutional actors. I don't know who runs Masto.Host but they seem to be positioned to offer your software as a service to these groups. There are other AP implementations that can be sold (as a service) to these large pocketed groups, not just your own software product. another edit: this may leave a sour taste in your mouth but you now have a notable political user of your software, one that more than likely does not have the technical competence to be running it on their own. Someone could be making money off of them by providing a managed, white-labeled Mastodon instance (and then be responsible for scaling, security, availability, all the devops shit, etc). Not saying that should be you, but someone could.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      This doesn’t make any sense. If people are willing to pay for a Twitter like service they are going to pay Twitter before they pay for mastodon instances
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    And companies already run their own Mastodon instances - the Japanese imageboard/artist website Pixiv runs a Mastodon instance called Pawoo. That's apparently how elephants and/or mammoths sound like in Japanese. :)
artfulhippo 5y ago
Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists. People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business. Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's high-scoring players feel important. Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire. As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your own supply."
- vmoore 5y ago
  > Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists. I always found it amusing that common people who are not that interesting share the same platform with influential people / thought leaders / celebrities. The fact you can just cold tweet and @mention a famous person out of the blue is highly parasocial and strange.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Well—you can @ their social media manager, anyway. Not much different than "calling your Senator" and getting some secretary in their office. Though I'm sure some do actually use it themselves (Musk seems to, for instance)
    - solarkraft 5y ago
      A lot of them seem to and that's the big deal. Though they likely won't see your mention if they don't follow you.
enos_feedler 5y ago
I really don't think Twitter could afford to charge for reading or writing. There is too much competition for eyeballs in social. What they need to do is continue making it free, and enable creators to grew new businesses on top of Twitter and take a cut. The issue here is Apple and Google taking 30%, but growth is growth, even if that cost exists.
vmoore 5y ago
Jack had his hands in so many pies. Cash App, Square, and also evangelizes cryptocurrency every chance he gets. His Twitter Bio just has one word in it: `Bitcoin`. I think he was spreading himself thinly being involved with Twitter too. Focus.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  Cash App is just a consumer payments app made by Square, not a separate company.
- curiousfiddler 5y ago
  Absolutely. For a platform with a relatively high engagement early on, they made so many missteps: awful photo/video tools (instagram, tiktok), messing up live, messing up developer experience, stagnant product (awful thread management for YEARS). However, I still believe it can be fixed. As an example, my consumption of news related information has moved significantly to Twitter. Why not do a better job there, in trying to provide a kick-ass way for content creators/consumers, and charge them for it.
jollybean 5y ago
The author is risking being a bit glib without much more detailed data check. People don't like to pay for stuff, and while surely Twitter has many users for whom $4 would be irrelevant, it's going to be a surprisingly small number - and - we've already established a price of $0 in people's minds for the service. Charging $25/month for the blue check and a bunch of other pro services (including priority in feeds) might be some kind of opportunity. Where the author is correct and also reasonable in being more generalized about it ... is the lack of a good Ad Program. That should be embarrassing. Twitter has enough data to be able to offer something approaching targeted, actionable Ads like Facebook. And I think they can do it in a reasonable way.
freediver 5y ago
A better business model would be to charge progressively based on number of followers. This way users pay not for consumption, but for amplification of their messaging. Something like 0-100 followers : free 100-1,000: $5/mo 1,000-10,000: $20/mo ... 1M+ : $10,000/mo per 1M The aligns the incentives and value provided. Someone having 1M followers on twitter has a powerful platform for their agenda whatever it may be. This should come at a progressively higher cost to them (not their followers).
- i2infinity 5y ago
  I wouldn't bet on this! For this, Twitter would have to divulge how many among the say 1000 followers are bots. Also, this is prone to abuse! An unnecessary follow will now be considered spam, and Twitter would have to build toolings to prevent that. It will drive creators out of Twitter. Sharing ad revenue with creators will be an excellent first step
- blawson 5y ago
  I like it, but that might encourage the top profiles to take their audience off platform entirely. Unlike say Youtube, I don't think Twitter creators are able to monetize directly on platform?
  - freediver 5y ago
    I do no think that would happen. Someone having 1M followers usually has $10k/mo to spare. And the value they are getting from amplifying their message for branding purposes certainly outweighs the cost by couple of orders of magnitude. I'd probably pay $10k/mo for my brand if it allowed me to talk to 1M people interested in my products as frequently as I wanted. How much would the same cost me on other platforms? A comparable business is something like mailchimp where you pay $300/mo to message just 10,000 contacts. And yes, Twitter would need to get better at purging bots, but that is a good thing and a nice incentive to have.
- riffic 5y ago
  I agree with you here. There's a huge value in the amplification of messaging and Twitter's pretty much giving this away for free. Media and institutions have the budget to pay here.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
It seems crazy that people bemoan the fact that twitter only does 4.8 bill or whatever the current run rate is. Since when is that awful? It's only awful when you compare it to Facebook and a few others. Compared to almost all businesses ever, it has grown to be a giant in an amazingly short period of time and is doing well on every dimension, including financial. It's popular, engaging and has a solid business model. Again, only when you compare it to some of the most freakish outliers in the history of business does it look less than amazing.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  Well you've just outlined the problem. Twitter's Board of Directors is a listing of people who've come to expect the projects with which they're involved - either directly or tangentially - or with which they invest, to perform in such a ridiculously obscene manner that even exceptional growth and profits appears to be "underperforming". For many of these people, there's no problem - where "problem" is defined as 'not being a 1000x bagger stock 5 - 10 years from IPO launch' - that cannot be solved through some alchemical combination of AI/ML, automation, aggressive user engagement, monetization, etc. Compared to Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc., Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly insane to think.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    I just did a super take with a sibling comment to yours comparing Twitter to other social media and comm products. > Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly insane to think. Yes, this is absolutely crazy! The other problem is how much Twitter is brought up by people and the media. Data shows a minority of the already minority of people who use Twitter, talk politics. Yet you can’t go any time without people pointing to Twitter as a representation of a huge population to prove their points. For example, reactions to “cancelling” someone will have droves of people and media point to a tiny portion of Twitter saying things that can’t represent the massive demographic people are critiquing. All of this makes Twitter seem so much more important even to people not constantly around tech, startup, or SV circles.
solarkraft 5y ago
> Twitter makes an average of $22.75 per monetizable daily active user per year That's plenty to pay for hosting and even a few moderation cases per year. Cool, so they're fine!
EarlKing 5y ago
Attempting to paywall Twitter at this late stage is a recipe for disaster. People have become accustomed to receiving information 'for nothing'. Telling them that they must now pay for it will lead to a grand exodus elsewhere. It's not that you cannot create a paywall across a service like Twitter, but that you simply cannot do it on Twitter if for no reason other than the fact that Twitter has operated for fifteen years already without a paywall, and no one is going to start paying for what was already adequately paid for without a subscription. TL;DR Paywalls are for new services, not Twitter.
a-dub 5y ago
twitter would be a lot more fun if they just accepted what they're actually useful for, an attention game. they should hire a large team of writers and ban links to the real world- turn the whole thing into a giant fantasy larp game and charge people to play.
Goety 5y ago
Share price is going to get a nice squeeze
bobjordan 5y ago
Me in 2009: “I love twitter. I can follow so many people doing things I’m interested in.” Me again, today:”Deleted that shit and never going back.” The poor management brought me to that ending and I don’t foresee it getting anything but worse with the new CEO.
tamaharbor 5y ago
Twitter is worthless as long as they continue to censor dissenting opinions.
kens 5y ago
Twitter's ad targeting is atrocious and they're just throwing money away. My experience is that the ads are either random national brands, semi-spam as-seen-on-TV-quality stuff, or wildly mistargeted things. E.g. Twitter keeps showing me ads targeted to an oncologist, which is bizarre. Or they are for things on the opposite side of the country from me. My interests are fairly straightforward and Google shows me well-targeted ads, but Twitter's targeting is just a disaster. Before moving to a completely new business model, Twitter should at least try some decent ad targeting.
- esyir 5y ago
  Is Twitter's ad targeting bad, or are you an outlier case. If I'd use myself as an example, with a company with generally considered "good" ad-targeting (GOOG), I get really odd ads like those for spinal implants. It could be that you've fallen into one of those minima.
- arthurofbabylon 5y ago
  Twitter’s ad targeting is so bad. As bad as the bottom of clickbait topical articles. They currently rely on volume and “clicks.” They have a reputation of being a very cheap CPM ad platform… and that is not a good thing. For an ad-driven business with clear interest indicators, it is astonishing that Twitter hasn’t addressed this advertiser quality problem. Low hanging fruit at their revenue bottle neck.
scruffyherder 5y ago
Whatever it takes to drive them bankrupt asap.
tomlin 5y ago
Agree. * Blue Check: Free, validate with 3rd party ID auth system * Anonymous: $10/month
track3r 5y ago
Judging by my feed today it is an ad for every 3 messages.
aj7 5y ago
Twitter’s user base is always near saturation; it’s not a moron base. So additional revenue most likely will come from some subscription or producer fee model. A great deal of value comes from posts by reporters, scientists, doctors, writers, front-line working people. This is lost on people reading below about an eighth grade level— limiting the user base.
sytelus 5y ago
Twitter is doing just fine. I really don't want Twitter to start bombarding with ads, show only attention grabing content or make people pay subscriptions. I don't understand this enormous urges to have new business models and massive growth at all costs because somehow it's otherwise not an important business. May be some businesses are better left alone from this mindset for long term healthy existence and better services to its customers?
mancerayder 5y ago
Will this company come up with anything new to alter the perception of lackluster performance?

205 points by oedmarap 5y ago

I use Twitter is to get the latest pulse in real time for any event (news story, episode). I hope they retain that. Problem with highly curated feeds like FB, LinkedIn is that it doesn't give you the the current snapshot and hence I don't even trust it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

OldTimeCoffee 5y ago

If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with (because people would have found it valuable enough to pay for in the first place). In some ways, Twitter has the "news" problem in that people just aren't willing to pay for it. As this says, Internet advertising really isn't that effective, especially on a site that is the equivalent of standing in town square with a megaphone. I think Twitter is tapped out on how much money it can make and drastic changes will just drive users to other places. If you're looking for higher returns a different company might be a better idea.

TheTrotters 5y ago
What kind of logic is this? Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported. Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye. Most media companies started with ad-supported websites and plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model.
- rp1 5y ago
  You’re ignoring the competitive landscape. You might pay for Google, but a lot of people would choose to use a free alternative if they needed to pay. The loss in users would give Google less data and make Google less effective as a search engine.
  - TheTrotters 5y ago
    You’re absolutely right about Google but, I think, it’s not necessarily true for Twitter. Their social graph is so important that it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone. And everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      > it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone True, but they may leave microblogging behind altogether rather than pay. Twitter just isn't that valuable. Then again, I deleted my accounts four or five years ago.
    - syshum 5y ago
      >>everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem. If this were true we would not have a long long list of defunct once popular platforms where people used to be, but moved away from in mass after poor decisions by the platform operators. To believe twitter is immune to the digg, myspace, etc effect is hubris not backed by reality
      - TheTrotters 5y ago
        That’s of course a fair point. But there are key differences. Twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world. People’s careers and influence are built partly on their follower count and who those followers are. Key users post under their real name. Digg and MySpace were very different from that.
        syshum 5y ago
        >>twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world I think this is over stated, Twitter is used to amplify, or bring attention to some announcment, event, or other communication but twitter itself is not the communication channel, it simply links to the communication channel which is often another platform (youtube as an example) or a website, or some other communication type. Twitter is advertising, be it paid ads, or the "politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics " advertising their own work directing people off twitter to consume more of that work Personally I have found very little value and very little substantive communications coming out of twitter, in fact the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme accounts not to find actual information or news
- OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
  > Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported. I don't think that's true, because they would charge for access and have ads. These are fairly rare. >Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye. Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads. >plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model That's not really true, you have massive consolation because their business model is nonviable any other way.
  - TheTrotters 5y ago
    > Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads. They make money from ads… which people see when they use search. Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled. Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing. But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible. EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.
    - OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
      > Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. This logic is backwards. Having a large userbase allows them to sell ads in the first place to the user base that won't pay for the service in the first place. Pretty much every large tech website has a building phase where they make no money and sell no ads while building a user base large enough to start selling ads. None of the large web companies today have charged to use their product and at this point it's unlikely they could. >But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible. Which is a terrible argument written by someone who doesn't understand the market. It's like saying no one will move away from AIM in 1999. Yes, people will. There are lots of historical examples, including the Digg to Reddit exodus. Even Facebook itself has had the problem of users migrating away from Facebook. Facebook has literally bought companies where users have migrated to (Instagram/WhatsApp). > EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. Virtually none. No one was paying for TweetDeck and now it's part of Twitter. Consumers aren't using HootSuite or Sprout Social, they target businesses. Going down the Android list most Twitter apps are free, the few that cost anything have small install bases (Fenix 2 <100k purchases, Talon for Twitter is ~ 100k purchases). Twitter has an daily active users of over 300 million users. So maybe 0.1% are willing to pay a one time fee for a client? I don't think Twitter can do much with that. Virtually no one,on a consumer level, is willing to pay for a messaging service. WhatsApp (one-to-one) is free, Facebook is free (broadcast), Instagram is free, Snapchat is free, YouTube is free, TikTok is free, Skype is free, Zoom is free (to individuals), Google Chat is free, SMS/MMS/RCS usage is free (depending on how you look at the service cost). On a business level you can extract payments (think Slack), but on a consumer level, messaging has no value people are will to pay (so it's ad supported instead).
paulcole 5y ago
The amount of money I’m willing to spend on jeans, electronics, etc. is much higher than the amount I’m willing to spend on Twitter. Makes sense that a service can sell ads for more money than I’m willing to pay for the service.
nindalf 5y ago
> If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with Twitter doesn’t cost $0 because no one thinks it’s worth paying for (demand side), it’s because if they did charge they’d be replaced by someone who didn’t (too much potential supply).
- OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
  If there was a market of people who would pay for such an app, there would be one on the market to satisfy the demand for it. Supply is irrelevant if there is no demand for it in the first place. Even taking this assertion, it means there is effectively infinite supply so Twitter's service has effectively no monetary value to the consumer. It's still impossible to charge a consumer for it then (and the costs to provide the service have to be paid by a 3rd party in ads). Edit: It's very difficult to build a network and get to a critical mass like Twitter. I'm still arguing it's demand constrained (people unwilling to pay) because you would see more viable competitors if it were supply.
mdorazio 5y ago
They could also boost profits by lowering their OpEx. I genuinely don’t know why they need to spend a billion dollars a quarter for a product that really doesn’t change that much and isn’t massively complex.
- sulam 5y ago
  What counts as complex? Is Facebook complex? Google? How about Netflix? By the measure of “I can explain how they work in a blog post” none of these are complex. But trust me, operating internet scale services is complex, regardless of how simple they seem from the outside.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  It would be fascinating to see their engineering backlog.

throwaway4good 5y ago

Chat with the crypto bros ... they've got some ideas ...

gvv 5y ago

I'm curious what will happen to Twitter's stance on BTC and crypto in general, given recent favorable developments.

user-the-name 5y ago
New guy is drinking at least as much kool-aid as the old guy, so crypto bullshit will continue to burn the world and user goodwill.
- z3rgl1ng 5y ago
  +1
- nasseri 5y ago
  When will people like you begin to realize how foolish you sound?
  - sremani 5y ago
    I wish crypto people HODL-ed their opinions.
    - nasseri 5y ago
      Are you familiar with the phrase "laughing all the way to the bank"?
      - pjc50 5y ago
        But you're your own bank. So you're just laughing at yourself.
        nasseri 5y ago
        Lol this was pretty good I have to admit.
      - 5y ago

mherdeg 5y ago

My favorite options for Twitter to make money are * Early access to tweets -- send an API call with Elon Musk's latest tweets 1000ms before they are public to algorithmic traders for $1M/month * Blue checkmark next to profile pictures that OpenSea verifies you own

rp1 5y ago
How would the second idea make money?
- mherdeg 5y ago
  Maybe only some images get flagged with the metadata that say that they work with Twitter, and OpenSea pays Twitter a 10% cut of any works-with-Twitter image rights they sell?
- detaro 5y ago
  make it only available to accounts that pay for it. Could work with that crowd. (or make it a paid thing on the seller side, pay to opt an offered series of pieces in). But probably overall not that much money to be had.
- everly 5y ago
  If a user has already spent money purchasing an NFT that they want to use as their profile picture, they will almost certainly spend a bit more for proof of ownership.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Elon would then instanly cease twitting on order not to alienate his fanbase.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Or undercut Twitter by selling folks access to his tweets 2000ms before they hit the API. His fanbase would eat that up.

lekevicius 5y ago

The question is, which aspect is monetized: reading or writing? If it's reading, then I see Twitter quickly losing out to a platform that is free to read. Politicians and celebrities wouldn't make announcements on a platform that requires payment to read. If it's writing / having an account, then the suggestion is a lot more reasonable. I would pay $4/mo, and would be very glad to not have spam comments below every tweet I read.

cblconfederate 5y ago
Twitter is a first-responder medium. If people had to pay we'd miss so many breaking events that make it valuable to journalists et al in the first place. That model would work for a newsletter , but not for a live medium
barkerja 5y ago
They already have a subscription model for this: Twitter Blue https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introducing-twitter-blue https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci... It enhances the experience on Twitter for those that desire more features: a thread feature (which is /really/ nice IMHO), ability to cancel tweets after send, more color themes and customizable icons, etc. The Twitter "as we know it" will likely always remain free and ad-driven, but if you want an enhanced experience, you're going to have to pay for it. And that's fine by me.
- ryanmcbride 5y ago
  I'd buy twitter blue right now if it didn't still have ads. I'd pay 3 times its cost if it was just ad free. Sure it's not a problem on my computer because I have adblock but I primarily use twitter on my phone, and I'm too lazy to set up an adblocking DNS like pihole.
  - lekevicius 5y ago
    You can try to use a third-party client like Tweetbot. They don't have ads.
5y ago

chrismorgan 5y ago

> Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. I’d even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month. (I’m mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I’m basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and people’s commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)

xyzzy21 5y ago
I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either way it improves the world!
AniseAbyss 5y ago
The very reason why much of the internet is financed by advertising money is because users do not in fact want to pay a subscription.
zhdc1 5y ago
> I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.
- pram 5y ago
  This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
  - 5y ago

12xo 5y ago

Charge accounts with 100k followers $100 a week. 1m 1000 a week. If they don't pay, they don't have the followers and cannot prove their own business/brand. These are the people who NEED Twitter. Make them pay for the right to access the audience like every other media.

zhdc1 5y ago

This reminds me of when everyone found out during the dot com bubble that Booking.com[1], at the time a unicorn startup, was run out of a single office with something like a dozen or so employees. It didn't lead to the stock market crash, but it always stuck me as the first time that the general public started to really think that the whole dot com scene was a little out of whack. Twitter has a monopoly and 3B+ in revenue. It's hard to see how this justifies a 36B+ market cap. It's in a much better position than many, many other unicorns. [1] I'm going off of a twenty two or twenty three year old memory, so I may have gotten the company wrong.

karatinversion 5y ago
...Twitter has a monopoly?
- zhdc1 5y ago
  On what they do? Absolutely. If you combine all of the different 'social media' platforms together into a single category? No.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    What is it that Twitter does exactly? It mostly seems to exist to put out short one-to-many messages that other media organizations can then cite as Zeitgeist. That may not be a monopoly, but it certainly isn't benevolent to the user, and it isn't how it was billed when it was new.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      > What is it that Twitter does exactly? Break news and sic mobs on people. Both activities many people are extremely interested in being a part of.
  - 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

Maybe twitter can't make (more) money. Email or Instant messagers don't make money, but they are essential protocols. I think any change to its free model will instantly change its character so much that it will lose relevance and drive people to simpler open source solutions.

zhdc1 5y ago
> Maybe twitter can't make money. They had 3.7B in revenue last year. They're doing ok.

glintik 5y ago

New business model from me - $0.01 per post/comment, $1 - per hating post/comment. Make world happy again!

klyrs 5y ago
Don't silence dissent, just charge for it? This is the dystopia that scifi taught me to expect..

mythrwy 5y ago

Maybe they could charge people $1 to label other's posts as fake news. And $1 to remove one vote that a post is fake news. Capitalize on the flame wars. Ya, it won't make the world a better place but does Twitter do that now?

cletus 5y ago

A better title might be: How to Kill Twitter With This One Trick (Paid Access) Twitter is IMHO only a communication platform for celebrities and brands. This is <0.1% of the user base. For most people, your Tweets are even less noteworthy than Youtube comments. What users use Twitter for seems to be three things: 1. As a de facto notifications platform; 2. As a news feed aggregator. This then means consuming content off platform; and 3. "Voting" on content you agree or disagree with. Ultimately this is what liking and retweeing really is: no different to liking a Youtube video. That's all it does. Users are famously unwilling to part with even small sums of money for Internet services. Twitter seems no different here.

streamofdigits 5y ago

Maybe the global newspaper folk, who seem to be the most serious users of the platform, should form a joint venture, buy up twitter, disseminate microblogging news (ad)free and simply use the embedded links to drive traffic to their web platforms (for subscriptions and more in-depth news coverage). So twitter becomes a sort of neutral preview / public announcement forum, like a kiosk with folded newspapers on the street: you can see the headlines, but you need to buy to read. Alternatively, they could do the same from scratch without twitter... The problem is not what happens to twitter. The problem is how to have healthy, representative, inquisitive journalism

riffic 5y ago
There's absolutely nothing stopping a consortium of news outlets from adopting the W3C recommendation ActivityPub to push out microposts directly from their own content management systems, with an existing audience open web audience.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  that is in principle possible (essentially replace twitter by RSS aggregator clients) but is not exactly equivalent: for example some entities could microblog on "next-gen twitter" without having a website and there is also the question of reactions from readers to posts (whether those are seen centrally by all users) that centralization and processing of responses is by-and-large part of the social media problem (both generating the twitterstorm dynamic and having spawned the shadowy "sentiment" industry) but I suspect a lot of addicted users are quite keen to keep it going

tinyhouse 5y ago

Twitter need better relevancy. Their ads are some of the worse I've seen on any platform. The other thing they need, as pointed in the article, is other streams of revenue. Like LinkedIn for example. They sell a premium subscription to a small subsets of overall users (Twitter Blue is trying to do the same), have a successful job board, etc. The article mentions Twitter is making money of selling data. That's a good stream of revenue but they can do much better. I doubt the new CEO would make a big difference though. I think it's a bigger management issue than just replacing the CEO. We'll see how things turn out. So to respond to the original article by Ben Thompson, I don't think it makes sense to charge all users, but it does make a lot of sense to charge a subset of the users. People (companies) who use twitter for marketing for example.

danguson 5y ago

I have read from an article that they will enable NFT-based profile pictures in the near future, I wonder how will the new CEO act on this feature.

robofanatic 5y ago

dont know if twitter charges $$ to people with large number of followers. that would be a good way to make money.

riffic 5y ago

I've proposed a business model for a while for Twitter: take their software and whitelabel it for institutions, media, or whoever's big enough to own their own domain name and wants to have their own @namespace @example.com this would be a good fit for large media sites (journalism twitter is huge), government, businesses. let them pay. examples of this being expressed here by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654

gargron 5y ago
You are describing Mastodon [1] [1]: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
- riffic 5y ago
  hah, yes in a way I am. edit: Eugen, you can steal this business model from Twitter if they don't want to play in this space. Run Mastodon-as-a-service and sell it to institutional actors. I don't know who runs Masto.Host but they seem to be positioned to offer your software as a service to these groups. There are other AP implementations that can be sold (as a service) to these large pocketed groups, not just your own software product. another edit: this may leave a sour taste in your mouth but you now have a notable political user of your software, one that more than likely does not have the technical competence to be running it on their own. Someone could be making money off of them by providing a managed, white-labeled Mastodon instance (and then be responsible for scaling, security, availability, all the devops shit, etc). Not saying that should be you, but someone could.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    This doesn’t make any sense. If people are willing to pay for a Twitter like service they are going to pay Twitter before they pay for mastodon instances
- m4rtink 5y ago
  And companies already run their own Mastodon instances - the Japanese imageboard/artist website Pixiv runs a Mastodon instance called Pawoo. That's apparently how elephants and/or mammoths sound like in Japanese. :)

artfulhippo 5y ago

Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists. People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business. Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's high-scoring players feel important. Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire. As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your own supply."

vmoore 5y ago
> Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists. I always found it amusing that common people who are not that interesting share the same platform with influential people / thought leaders / celebrities. The fact you can just cold tweet and @mention a famous person out of the blue is highly parasocial and strange.
- handrous 5y ago
  Well—you can @ their social media manager, anyway. Not much different than "calling your Senator" and getting some secretary in their office. Though I'm sure some do actually use it themselves (Musk seems to, for instance)
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    A lot of them seem to and that's the big deal. Though they likely won't see your mention if they don't follow you.

enos_feedler 5y ago

I really don't think Twitter could afford to charge for reading or writing. There is too much competition for eyeballs in social. What they need to do is continue making it free, and enable creators to grew new businesses on top of Twitter and take a cut. The issue here is Apple and Google taking 30%, but growth is growth, even if that cost exists.

vmoore 5y ago

Jack had his hands in so many pies. Cash App, Square, and also evangelizes cryptocurrency every chance he gets. His Twitter Bio just has one word in it: `Bitcoin`. I think he was spreading himself thinly being involved with Twitter too. Focus.

KoftaBob 5y ago
Cash App is just a consumer payments app made by Square, not a separate company.
curiousfiddler 5y ago
Absolutely. For a platform with a relatively high engagement early on, they made so many missteps: awful photo/video tools (instagram, tiktok), messing up live, messing up developer experience, stagnant product (awful thread management for YEARS). However, I still believe it can be fixed. As an example, my consumption of news related information has moved significantly to Twitter. Why not do a better job there, in trying to provide a kick-ass way for content creators/consumers, and charge them for it.

jollybean 5y ago

The author is risking being a bit glib without much more detailed data check. People don't like to pay for stuff, and while surely Twitter has many users for whom $4 would be irrelevant, it's going to be a surprisingly small number - and - we've already established a price of $0 in people's minds for the service. Charging $25/month for the blue check and a bunch of other pro services (including priority in feeds) might be some kind of opportunity. Where the author is correct and also reasonable in being more generalized about it ... is the lack of a good Ad Program. That should be embarrassing. Twitter has enough data to be able to offer something approaching targeted, actionable Ads like Facebook. And I think they can do it in a reasonable way.

freediver 5y ago

A better business model would be to charge progressively based on number of followers. This way users pay not for consumption, but for amplification of their messaging. Something like 0-100 followers : free 100-1,000: $5/mo 1,000-10,000: $20/mo ... 1M+ : $10,000/mo per 1M The aligns the incentives and value provided. Someone having 1M followers on twitter has a powerful platform for their agenda whatever it may be. This should come at a progressively higher cost to them (not their followers).

i2infinity 5y ago
I wouldn't bet on this! For this, Twitter would have to divulge how many among the say 1000 followers are bots. Also, this is prone to abuse! An unnecessary follow will now be considered spam, and Twitter would have to build toolings to prevent that. It will drive creators out of Twitter. Sharing ad revenue with creators will be an excellent first step
blawson 5y ago
I like it, but that might encourage the top profiles to take their audience off platform entirely. Unlike say Youtube, I don't think Twitter creators are able to monetize directly on platform?
- freediver 5y ago
  I do no think that would happen. Someone having 1M followers usually has $10k/mo to spare. And the value they are getting from amplifying their message for branding purposes certainly outweighs the cost by couple of orders of magnitude. I'd probably pay $10k/mo for my brand if it allowed me to talk to 1M people interested in my products as frequently as I wanted. How much would the same cost me on other platforms? A comparable business is something like mailchimp where you pay $300/mo to message just 10,000 contacts. And yes, Twitter would need to get better at purging bots, but that is a good thing and a nice incentive to have.
riffic 5y ago
I agree with you here. There's a huge value in the amplification of messaging and Twitter's pretty much giving this away for free. Media and institutions have the budget to pay here.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

It seems crazy that people bemoan the fact that twitter only does 4.8 bill or whatever the current run rate is. Since when is that awful? It's only awful when you compare it to Facebook and a few others. Compared to almost all businesses ever, it has grown to be a giant in an amazingly short period of time and is doing well on every dimension, including financial. It's popular, engaging and has a solid business model. Again, only when you compare it to some of the most freakish outliers in the history of business does it look less than amazing.

cbozeman 5y ago
Well you've just outlined the problem. Twitter's Board of Directors is a listing of people who've come to expect the projects with which they're involved - either directly or tangentially - or with which they invest, to perform in such a ridiculously obscene manner that even exceptional growth and profits appears to be "underperforming". For many of these people, there's no problem - where "problem" is defined as 'not being a 1000x bagger stock 5 - 10 years from IPO launch' - that cannot be solved through some alchemical combination of AI/ML, automation, aggressive user engagement, monetization, etc. Compared to Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc., Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly insane to think.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  I just did a super take with a sibling comment to yours comparing Twitter to other social media and comm products. > Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly insane to think. Yes, this is absolutely crazy! The other problem is how much Twitter is brought up by people and the media. Data shows a minority of the already minority of people who use Twitter, talk politics. Yet you can’t go any time without people pointing to Twitter as a representation of a huge population to prove their points. For example, reactions to “cancelling” someone will have droves of people and media point to a tiny portion of Twitter saying things that can’t represent the massive demographic people are critiquing. All of this makes Twitter seem so much more important even to people not constantly around tech, startup, or SV circles.

solarkraft 5y ago

> Twitter makes an average of $22.75 per monetizable daily active user per year That's plenty to pay for hosting and even a few moderation cases per year. Cool, so they're fine!

EarlKing 5y ago

Attempting to paywall Twitter at this late stage is a recipe for disaster. People have become accustomed to receiving information 'for nothing'. Telling them that they must now pay for it will lead to a grand exodus elsewhere. It's not that you cannot create a paywall across a service like Twitter, but that you simply cannot do it on Twitter if for no reason other than the fact that Twitter has operated for fifteen years already without a paywall, and no one is going to start paying for what was already adequately paid for without a subscription. TL;DR Paywalls are for new services, not Twitter.

a-dub 5y ago

twitter would be a lot more fun if they just accepted what they're actually useful for, an attention game. they should hire a large team of writers and ban links to the real world- turn the whole thing into a giant fantasy larp game and charge people to play.

Goety 5y ago

Share price is going to get a nice squeeze

bobjordan 5y ago

Me in 2009: “I love twitter. I can follow so many people doing things I’m interested in.” Me again, today:”Deleted that shit and never going back.” The poor management brought me to that ending and I don’t foresee it getting anything but worse with the new CEO.

tamaharbor 5y ago

Twitter is worthless as long as they continue to censor dissenting opinions.

kens 5y ago

Twitter's ad targeting is atrocious and they're just throwing money away. My experience is that the ads are either random national brands, semi-spam as-seen-on-TV-quality stuff, or wildly mistargeted things. E.g. Twitter keeps showing me ads targeted to an oncologist, which is bizarre. Or they are for things on the opposite side of the country from me. My interests are fairly straightforward and Google shows me well-targeted ads, but Twitter's targeting is just a disaster. Before moving to a completely new business model, Twitter should at least try some decent ad targeting.

esyir 5y ago
Is Twitter's ad targeting bad, or are you an outlier case. If I'd use myself as an example, with a company with generally considered "good" ad-targeting (GOOG), I get really odd ads like those for spinal implants. It could be that you've fallen into one of those minima.
arthurofbabylon 5y ago
Twitter’s ad targeting is so bad. As bad as the bottom of clickbait topical articles. They currently rely on volume and “clicks.” They have a reputation of being a very cheap CPM ad platform… and that is not a good thing. For an ad-driven business with clear interest indicators, it is astonishing that Twitter hasn’t addressed this advertiser quality problem. Low hanging fruit at their revenue bottle neck.

scruffyherder 5y ago

Whatever it takes to drive them bankrupt asap.

tomlin 5y ago

Agree. * Blue Check: Free, validate with 3rd party ID auth system * Anonymous: $10/month

track3r 5y ago

Judging by my feed today it is an ad for every 3 messages.

aj7 5y ago

Twitter’s user base is always near saturation; it’s not a moron base. So additional revenue most likely will come from some subscription or producer fee model. A great deal of value comes from posts by reporters, scientists, doctors, writers, front-line working people. This is lost on people reading below about an eighth grade level— limiting the user base.

sytelus 5y ago

Twitter is doing just fine. I really don't want Twitter to start bombarding with ads, show only attention grabing content or make people pay subscriptions. I don't understand this enormous urges to have new business models and massive growth at all costs because somehow it's otherwise not an important business. May be some businesses are better left alone from this mindset for long term healthy existence and better services to its customers?

mancerayder 5y ago

Will this company come up with anything new to alter the perception of lackluster performance?