Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 361 posts

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

#271

Post by ryandrake »

icedchai wrote: post #166
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…

How many of these 350 million users are trolls and sock puppets? I know I have at least a half dozen Twitter accounts myself.

Hell, are they even active users? I know I probably signed up for twitter long ago when it started, maybe tweeted once or twice, and never used it again, finding it useless. Do their "user counts" count me?

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

#272

Post by byuu »

CM30 wrote: post #59
owenwil wrote: post #23

Google acquiring Twitter is actually the best end result here. Salesforce is probably the worst. Lots of people hate the idea of a Google acquisition, but I think it's well suited because: - Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them - The company is a very different one now from years ago - Google doesn't want to mess up identity again, so that wouldn't be an issue - Google mostly j…

Given what they've done with YouTube in the last few years or so, it doesn't seem quite like they've learned from their mistakes. I'm already seeing jokes about YouTube 'advertiser friendly' guidelines and 'YouTube Heroes' as we speak. Really, the one thing that keeps YouTube going is how expensive it is to compete with it. Twitter doesn't exactly have that luxury.

> Twitter doesn't exactly have that luxury.

Twitter's luxury is its existing userbase. Same for eBay, Paypal, and other near-monopolies.

Twitter's software is absolutely nothing special. You could have 95% of the core functionality in two weeks as a solo project. (Granted, it probably won't scale to 320m users right out of the gate ...)

The problem is that nobody's going to go and use your new Twitter-like service that has zero users. So if I built a Twitter clone, I'd probably get, at best, 100 very inactive users, no matter how great the service was.

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

#273

Post by Domenic_S »

mkagenius wrote: post #188
abc_lisper wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No shit! They should charge companies and news agencies, and anyone representing companies per tweet(1k per tweet or similar). They provide a valuable service - why should they give it to corporations for free?

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).

The tweet is the advertisement. Keep everything as it is today, but if you have 1mm+ reach per tweet, you pay $$$/tweet.

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

#274

Post by egypturnash »

imagist wrote: post #132
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment actually sort of explains the question I asked. Would you still maintain this view if either a) advertisers reduce their spend on FB because of poor results and the usual problem with saturation of any advertising channel and start looking at other options, or b) more events play out in the future where Twitter's place as the "other social network that people actually care about" becomes more important/r…

In the long run, I don't think that Twitter's problem is one of competition from FB or any other competitor. They have enough users that they could turn a profit even if they could monetize those users, regardless of competition. But they haven't turned a profit, which after 10 years is a strong indicator that they can't turn a profit. If Twitter is able to time an addition of ads with a major event that damages FB's…

Whenever people discuss Twitter's finances I wonder what they'd look like if there was a paid tier. Just a few bucks a year to mark your account as Supportin' Twitter. Without necessarily having any other perks. Except maybe "not having any fucking ads". I'd probably do it; I was a paid user of Livejournal for many years when it was Where All My Friends Were.

But no. It's always "monetize by becoming another goddamn channel to advertise to people through".

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

#278

Post by mark_l_watson »

Would it be a bad idea for Twitter to charge a small yearly fee for use? The reason why I think this might work is because some users are very loyal and might not mind spending $20/year for an advertisement free Twitter service. They have about 350 million users, according to a comment here, and if 50 million users would stay, that would be $100 million revenue per year, and with many fewer users, their cost of doing business would be reduced, but with reduced network effects the service would not be as valuable for users. I like Twitter and I would pay $20/year in return for no promoted tweets.

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

#279

Post by nostrademons »

jlebrech wrote: post #117
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…

at $29 per user, wouldn't it be better to spend $1 Billion creating a replacement for twitter and then giving each new user a dollar or something?

Bing tried this - they offered users cash for searching on Bing and buying things.

What resulted is that everybody searched on Google to find the thing they were interested in, then searched for that specific item on Bing, collected the cash, and quickly went back to Google. You don't change habits with a dollar or even $29, and consumer habits are immensely valuable.

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

#280

Post by dmoy »

jldugger wrote: post #126
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #82

Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if Twitter's fate is being decided and played out in the media via endless speculation? It is not like Twitter is a tiny company with an unknown brand, few users and no possibility of improving its profit margins. I am not aware of what they are trying to do, but at the same time it is not as if they could have exhau…

> Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if ... Is this just impatience from stockholders? Money doesn't grow on trees, and Facebook has lost a half billion dollars every year. They have maybe four years left at that rate before they run out of cash on hand. The numbers are improving by about 20 percent a year, which, if projected forward, means they'll s…

Wait fb is losing money? Sorry I couldn't parse that correctly.
Post reply on HN