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Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

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Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#211

Post by rrggrr »

scosman wrote: post #149
imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

Be careful conflating "never made a profit" with not having a business. They made $710M in revenue last quarter, up 48% yoy. Their expenses might be high, but they can address that. Companies like Amazon didn't make a profit for years, and are rightfully quite valuable in the eyes of the market. A $29 valuation per MAU is low if anything. Facebook is almost 10x that (and deserves to be). Early stage startups often ge…

Not all users are equal. A newsmaker, world leader, reporter, gatekeeper is worth MUCH more than $29.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#212

Post by imagist »

jgalt212 wrote: post #152
imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

> whose attempts to monetize users through advertising have correlated strongly with loss of users. I don't know if that's true, or how strong the correlation is, but if it's there and you as a founder can detect it before others, that's a good sign you should sell the company rather than stay independent.

Agreed.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#213

Post by gaius »

abc_lisper wrote: post #200
mkagenius wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fb doesn't do that. Twitter can follow what fb does. Right now twitter is very light weight, un-cluttered. It can change UI/UX to advertise more. Of-course there has to be value for advertisers as well - which I think is there (350M users).

Yeah. Twitter is a broadcasting platform. It is different from FB. FB feed has your mom and their friends' posts. Twitter doesn't, unless you explicitly ask for it. Not everything should be about advertising. Twitter can stay as it has, and just charge people with money, money.

The feeds of both are whatever the algo thinks - which will be some compromise between what you want and what the owner of the algo wants.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#215

Post by rrggrr »

hornbaker wrote: post #17

My bet is GOOG. They need a streaming newsfeed product in which to insert ads, especially on mobile where FB is killing it.

GOOG has to buy TWTR or its real-time web ambitions are dead. FB has to buy TWTR to prevent GOOG real-time entry. AAPL has to buy TWTR or be cut out from social media. MSFT too. The bidding war that is going on behind the scenes must be unreal. This acquistion may be the biggest ever.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#216

Post by javiramos »

imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

Sure, but they are also growing incredibly fast at ~50% yoy with over $2 billion in revenue. I think that they have a fantastic revenue generating capability which justifies the valuation.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#217

Post by tyenl »

dominotw wrote: post #97
imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

> If you find yourself thinking that Twitter is a company with any real value What about non-monetary value like playing a key role in 'Arab Spring'[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...

I wouldn't be too quick to cast a positive on Arab Spring. Most of those countries have yet to recover and it is arguable that it was a precursor to the current migrant crisis.

I would agree that the democratic organizing power of twitter is impressive.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#218

Post by tkxxx7 »

gaius wrote: post #213
abc_lisper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Twitter is a broadcasting platform. It is different from FB. FB feed has your mom and their friends' posts. Twitter doesn't, unless you explicitly ask for it. Not everything should be about advertising. Twitter can stay as it has, and just charge people with money, money.

The feeds of both are whatever the algo thinks - which will be some compromise between what you want and what the owner of the algo wants.

What is algorithm-driven in my twitter feed? The 'While you were away' stuff at the top? Other than that, as far as I know it's always been a chronological feed of whoever I want.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#220

Post by pjc50 »

reitanqild wrote: post #138
bad_user wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ridiculously low character limit is one of the reasons I'm active on Twitter much more than anywhere else, as it forces people to be concise. And for everything else, like complex thoughts that can't be expressed as tweets, there are always blogs, whose URLs you can also distribute via Twitter. Twitter basically works like your personal aggregator of interesting stuff. And I freaking hate people using Facebook o…

Eh by spam-everyone-all-the-time I mean that any message I post will be "spammed" out to all my followers even if they just follow me for my Java interest or because I sometimes tweet about local politics.

But this is one of the things I like about twitter :) Well, most of the time. Sometimes you find out your heroes are terrible people.

When it works you find out things you didn't know you were interested in - getting out of the 'filter bubble'.

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