11 ms·

But there is no need for Twitter to allow you to do that for free just because. From a pure business perspective it's either Twitter dies or Elon pays the bill

But there is no need for Twitter to allow you to do that for free just because. From a pure business perspective it's either Twitter dies or Elon pays the bills.

mjmsmith 4y ago
Why not both?
wil421 4y ago
I’m sure it didn’t help that Elon pissed off most of Twitter’s advertisers. They jumped shipped as soon as he took over. > Daily Revenue Has Dropped 40%, 500 Top Advertisers Have Left https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-manager-daily-revenue-has-dropped-40-500-top-advertisers-have-left https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-manager-dail...
Ciantic 4y ago
Twitter wouldn't die if they don't pay bills, someone would buy it for huge discount. It seems like it would be the best way forward, depending on who would buy it. A lot of people don't follow news or Elon drama, the brand still has a lot of value. Especially abroad where news about Elon are much fewer.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  It'd have to be a huge discount as they'd be buying the debt along with it. Why would someone want to saddle themselves with an unprofitable debt burden?
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    BofA/whoever lent $12B or whatever to Twitter/Elon. Ultimately they have to settle for lower payments or get Tesla stock or whatever, and the debt is cleared. Or it defaults. Either way, Twitter the service has no reason to shut down, and doesn't carry that debt further. Once the debt cost is sunk, what matters is future marginal profitability.
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      I agree. The question then is how much the lenders are willing to settle for or whether it'll need to go through bankruptcy first.
- aspyct 4y ago
  Sure. Is that person going to run it for free alone in his basement? It's not only the code base. It's employees, servers, processes, data... Even if you get twitter for free, you still need to pay to run it.
  - Ciantic 4y ago
    The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. Even if they went bust and the service would be unavailable for a year, the social graph and brand value are important. One reason Mastodon and others have trouble is that people don't want to follow random people, they want to follow the same people they did on Twitter. It's their community. Certain communities did make a successful switch, like Apple and Tech journalist communities, but not a lot of other communities.
    - ploum 4y ago
      There are tools to help you with that. Like https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
    - kibwen 4y ago
      > The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. This seems to be taken as given, but how specifically would you expect someone to simply monetize the social graph? Just because data exists doesn't mean that anyone wants to pay for it. As for the value of the brand itself, we could say the same thing about Yahoo in 2010.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        Dear advertisers, so you want to reach _specific_social_demographic? Good news, I can tell you 500k people who have demonstrated 3 points of identification with that demo in the last 14 days and are minimum 5% likely to interact positively with a promoted tweet from a firm in your market sector. You can really pull a lot of useful data on someone by just looking at their follow choices, self-identification, and reply/retweeting behavior. And that's before you add all the information Twitter maintains on things like profile views or video plays, or the consistency of entity identification in tweet content etc. I can give you very specific kinds of demographics like 'people who enjoy tweets about dogs and football but not cats or politics.'
parker_mountain 4y ago
From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  > From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it. Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    It provides no direct income. But it provide monetary benefits by attracting and keeping users, which encourages ad spend. Or at least it used to, until the big advertisers were driven away. If someone is trying to run a business and doesn't understand how indirect income works they might want to consider something less challenging. What this actually does is remove API access from small startups, solo developers, and other innovators, and reserves it for corporations.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
      - zpeti 4y ago
        Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation. He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
fortyseven 4y ago
[flagged]

But there is no need for Twitter to allow you to do that for free just because. From a pure business perspective it's either Twitter dies or Elon pays the bills.

mjmsmith 4y ago

Why not both?

wil421 4y ago

I’m sure it didn’t help that Elon pissed off most of Twitter’s advertisers. They jumped shipped as soon as he took over. > Daily Revenue Has Dropped 40%, 500 Top Advertisers Have Left https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-manager-daily-revenue-has-dropped-40-500-top-advertisers-have-left https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-manager-dail...

Ciantic 4y ago

Twitter wouldn't die if they don't pay bills, someone would buy it for huge discount. It seems like it would be the best way forward, depending on who would buy it. A lot of people don't follow news or Elon drama, the brand still has a lot of value. Especially abroad where news about Elon are much fewer.

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
It'd have to be a huge discount as they'd be buying the debt along with it. Why would someone want to saddle themselves with an unprofitable debt burden?
- hgsgm 4y ago
  BofA/whoever lent $12B or whatever to Twitter/Elon. Ultimately they have to settle for lower payments or get Tesla stock or whatever, and the debt is cleared. Or it defaults. Either way, Twitter the service has no reason to shut down, and doesn't carry that debt further. Once the debt cost is sunk, what matters is future marginal profitability.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    I agree. The question then is how much the lenders are willing to settle for or whether it'll need to go through bankruptcy first.
aspyct 4y ago
Sure. Is that person going to run it for free alone in his basement? It's not only the code base. It's employees, servers, processes, data... Even if you get twitter for free, you still need to pay to run it.
- Ciantic 4y ago
  The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. Even if they went bust and the service would be unavailable for a year, the social graph and brand value are important. One reason Mastodon and others have trouble is that people don't want to follow random people, they want to follow the same people they did on Twitter. It's their community. Certain communities did make a successful switch, like Apple and Tech journalist communities, but not a lot of other communities.
  - ploum 4y ago
    There are tools to help you with that. Like https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
  - kibwen 4y ago
    > The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. This seems to be taken as given, but how specifically would you expect someone to simply monetize the social graph? Just because data exists doesn't mean that anyone wants to pay for it. As for the value of the brand itself, we could say the same thing about Yahoo in 2010.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Dear advertisers, so you want to reach _specific_social_demographic? Good news, I can tell you 500k people who have demonstrated 3 points of identification with that demo in the last 14 days and are minimum 5% likely to interact positively with a promoted tweet from a firm in your market sector. You can really pull a lot of useful data on someone by just looking at their follow choices, self-identification, and reply/retweeting behavior. And that's before you add all the information Twitter maintains on things like profile views or video plays, or the consistency of entity identification in tweet content etc. I can give you very specific kinds of demographics like 'people who enjoy tweets about dogs and football but not cats or politics.'

parker_mountain 4y ago

From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.

cercatrova 4y ago
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it. Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  It provides no direct income. But it provide monetary benefits by attracting and keeping users, which encourages ad spend. Or at least it used to, until the big advertisers were driven away. If someone is trying to run a business and doesn't understand how indirect income works they might want to consider something less challenging. What this actually does is remove API access from small startups, solo developers, and other innovators, and reserves it for corporations.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
    - zpeti 4y ago
      Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation. He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.

fortyseven 4y ago

[flagged]