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I disagree, in terms of analytics/targeting twitter is better or as good as Facebook. Have you used the platform? You can literally target ads at a specific s

I disagree, in terms of analytics/targeting twitter is better or as good as Facebook. Have you used the platform? You can literally target ads at a specific set of users, their followers, etc.

ChuckMcM 13y ago
I don't disagree that they are able to do better targeting, what I don't see is that the ad revenue is able to pay for their costs. The golden standard, search advertising, can tie buying intent to demographics to vendor and track conversions. The old standard, television advertising, can tie viewers to demographics but struggles with tracking conversions and understanding buying intent. To try to get my head around the scope of this I did a bit of searching around for data on Television advertising. CBS got advertising commitments of $2.7B [1] for placement on its prime time shows. Prime time is 3 hours a night (7-10 or 8-11 depending on your time zone). Assuming 41 advertisements per hour [2] that is 123 Adds per day, 7 days a week is 861 ads, 52 weeks is 44,772 ads per year. If they sold them for $2.7B in commitments that is $60,305 per single advertising placement, one day, one show, one advertisement. I expect it is much more complicated than that but order of magnitude it meshes with numbers people throw around. So if you agree with the reasoning there ... How does Twitter get to the point where someone will pay even $50,000 to send out a single 'sponsored tweet' or some other chunk of information to an equivalent demographic? That is the challenge I see for them going forward. [1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303768104577462944014974960.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230376810457746... [2] http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/primetime-tv-hour-includes-41-commercials-9434/ http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/primetime-tv-ho...
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  My genuine question: how many people watched the tv ad and didnt ignore it? If I wanted 5$ CPMs, at 60k per ad, I'd expect 12,000,000 people to see it -- not unreasonable by prime time TV standards From there, I'd argue that for brand advertising TV is more powerful because TV watchers will prefer to continue doing the same thing (stare at TV) vs ignoring the commercial or pressing mute. Arguably the big difference is the entry requirements, you can't do anything on TV for less than 4 figures, whereas you can get started on twitter for single digit ad spends
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    Its a good question on impact, but my point was to the pricing authority that Television has, which it got through a historical and perhaps no longer relevant understanding. My point is if Twitter is competing with web search which is both cheaper and more effective than TV. When people follow Ashton or Miley they care what they say, not some random ad that comes through from them following them. Anyway, the feeling of "its really big" but not a lot of specificity about the bigness was, for me, one of the hallmarks of the dot com bubble. I remember Eric Schmidt (which I was at Sun) remarking that if anything he felt the Internet was under hyped. And while he was ultimately correct, the people who were hyping were actually quite mistaken about "how" it was under hyped. (That is so to illustrate my comment about a 'sense' of bigness without specificity). As I watch Twitter's evolution I am on the look out for either new value they create or captured value they take from other sources. One candidate for losing value is 'nightly news' which already took a huge hit to 24hr news channels. It may not survive another :-). But the 21st century newscast is a very different thing. Exciting times.

I disagree, in terms of analytics/targeting twitter is better or as good as Facebook. Have you used the platform? You can literally target ads at a specific set of users, their followers, etc.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I don't disagree that they are able to do better targeting, what I don't see is that the ad revenue is able to pay for their costs. The golden standard, search advertising, can tie buying intent to demographics to vendor and track conversions. The old standard, television advertising, can tie viewers to demographics but struggles with tracking conversions and understanding buying intent. To try to get my head around the scope of this I did a bit of searching around for data on Television advertising. CBS got advertising commitments of $2.7B [1] for placement on its prime time shows. Prime time is 3 hours a night (7-10 or 8-11 depending on your time zone). Assuming 41 advertisements per hour [2] that is 123 Adds per day, 7 days a week is 861 ads, 52 weeks is 44,772 ads per year. If they sold them for $2.7B in commitments that is $60,305 per single advertising placement, one day, one show, one advertisement. I expect it is much more complicated than that but order of magnitude it meshes with numbers people throw around. So if you agree with the reasoning there ... How does Twitter get to the point where someone will pay even $50,000 to send out a single 'sponsored tweet' or some other chunk of information to an equivalent demographic? That is the challenge I see for them going forward. [1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303768104577462944014974960.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230376810457746... [2] http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/primetime-tv-hour-includes-41-commercials-9434/ http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/primetime-tv-ho...

hayksaakian 13y ago
My genuine question: how many people watched the tv ad and didnt ignore it? If I wanted 5$ CPMs, at 60k per ad, I'd expect 12,000,000 people to see it -- not unreasonable by prime time TV standards From there, I'd argue that for brand advertising TV is more powerful because TV watchers will prefer to continue doing the same thing (stare at TV) vs ignoring the commercial or pressing mute. Arguably the big difference is the entry requirements, you can't do anything on TV for less than 4 figures, whereas you can get started on twitter for single digit ad spends
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Its a good question on impact, but my point was to the pricing authority that Television has, which it got through a historical and perhaps no longer relevant understanding. My point is if Twitter is competing with web search which is both cheaper and more effective than TV. When people follow Ashton or Miley they care what they say, not some random ad that comes through from them following them. Anyway, the feeling of "its really big" but not a lot of specificity about the bigness was, for me, one of the hallmarks of the dot com bubble. I remember Eric Schmidt (which I was at Sun) remarking that if anything he felt the Internet was under hyped. And while he was ultimately correct, the people who were hyping were actually quite mistaken about "how" it was under hyped. (That is so to illustrate my comment about a 'sense' of bigness without specificity). As I watch Twitter's evolution I am on the look out for either new value they create or captured value they take from other sources. One candidate for losing value is 'nightly news' which already took a huge hit to 24hr news channels. It may not survive another :-). But the 21st century newscast is a very different thing. Exciting times.