The trending topics were hyper-localized, often down to the city. It's a very small task that they scaled up to a massive degree. Twitter pre-acquisition wasn'

The trending topics were hyper-localized, often down to the city. It's a very small task that they scaled up to a massive degree. Twitter pre-acquisition wasn't bleeding money, and it's plausible that these positions had positive ROI if they increased engagement and thus ad views.