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

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321–330 of 361 posts

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

#321
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is sponsored by large tech companies.

Um.. This is exactly what advertising is. Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.

Not necessarily. They could pay for the platform to be around just so that people are there to banter and generate content for the news programs.

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

#322
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is sponsored by large tech companies.

Um.. This is exactly what advertising is. Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.

The two platforms are completely different. The users of FB (and LinkedIn) put their real information on the website, allowing advertisers to target effectively which raises the average ad value on the website. Intuitively, revenue = ad value * # impressions.

Twitter is in between anonymous forums (unfortunately they all died) and FB/LinkedIn in terms of ability of advertisers to target users. They're living off of high impressions, and they've basically already saturated the market. Now they need to somehow raise ad value, which would mean integrating hundreds of free, quality services to gather data like Google or tying Twitter accounts to real identities (like the Google+ attempt)

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

#323
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always write them off, but I do wonder if it's more of an emotional write off or the fact that as non twitter users, they refuse to see value because they personally don't see value. I'm not a twitter user or advocate but: 106.31M 316.93M 664.89M 1.4B 2.22B That's their revenue over the past 5 years. Their R&D cost last year was over 800M. I'm not saying they are Google, I'm not saying they are LinkedIn, but t…

The only reason revenue, users, scale, investor love, patents, staff, infrastructure, etc. matter is that they usually are indicators of potential for profit. Profit is the entire point of investing in a company. But the greater indicator of potential for profit here is that Twitter has existed for 10 years and has never turned a profit. Given this, I think that revenue, users, scale, investor love, patents, staff, i…

There is no way Twitter couldn't turn a profit on $2B in revenue. But that's not their focus at the moment. Instead they really want to grow the revenue numbers even higher, worrying about the profit later. However they may not be able to increase revenue much higher, and investors aren't really interested in a profitable but stagnant Twitter. But if they wanted a profit they certainly could, starting by right sizing the company rather than pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D that is barely moving the needle.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also the Google+ API is still read-only. Which means you can only use Google's official tools for posting content. There's no way for example to cross-post on both Twitter and Google+. Apps like TweetDeck aren't possible for Google+. Is this true? Buffer allows you to cross-post to Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

I don't know what Buffer is, but if they can post to Google+ it only means they have a private deal with Google. The Google+ API is read-only, it says so in their own docs: https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/ And if you want a service that has integration with everything except for Google+, there's IFTTT.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think buffer can also post to Instagram

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

#325
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um.. This is exactly what advertising is. Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.

The two platforms are completely different. The users of FB (and LinkedIn) put their real information on the website, allowing advertisers to target effectively which raises the average ad value on the website. Intuitively, revenue = ad value * # impressions. Twitter is in between anonymous forums (unfortunately they all died) and FB/LinkedIn in terms of ability of advertisers to target users. They're living off of h…

Different yes but it's not that hard to look at the people you follow, the content you consume and generate what Twitter called the "taste graph". I'm not privy to what the issues are but I feel Twitter should/could've had a lot more success in terms of ads

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on poor finances. But Twitter has one thing that no one else has - they are in the center of the zeitgeist. Every political candidate is on Twitter. Every news network discusses Twitter happenings everyday. NFL broadcasts list players' Twitter handles. Half the commercials on TV advertise hashtags. South Park just did a whole episode about Twitter. The cost to embed your brand in the minds of Americans like th…

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1]

Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit

Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base

Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet.

People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost.

If this weeds out 80% of the shit while keeping 80% of the good stuff, Twitter will simultaneously shrink their costs while growing revenues to become a sustainable business.

With this model, Twitter is a $1 billion per year profitable business [2] with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. [3]

Improve the signal-to-noise ratio and Twitter becomes THE place to be for all kinds of communities. That means a return to growth and higher rates per 1000 tweets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[2] Start with 200 billion tweets per year. 90% are shit, and 80% of these go away, leaving 36 billion shitty tweets. 10% are good, and 80% of these stay, leaving 16 billion good tweets. 52 billion tweets in total, monetized at $20 per thousand is a billion bucks a year.

[3] Signal-to-noise ratio before is 1:9, after it's 1:2.

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

#327
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…

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…

> advertisers reduce their spend on FB because of poor results

The problem I see is that FaceBook's news feed is a driver of traffic to other websites, as people click those links, whereas Twitter doesn't seem to drive much traffic. I know sites that get 40% of their traffic from m.facebook, and another 30% from www.facebook.com month in, month out. I don't know many (if any?) sites where Twitter is ONE OF the major source of traffic, let alone THE major source of traffic.

That makes Twitter's product far less advertiser useful than even companies like Outbrain and Taboola.

I just think the way things have panned out, it is a source of interesting comments, but not really a place to find interesting stuff. Both FaceBook and Google are the roads that lead to destinations, whereas Twitter is the destination. Sadly, for an advertising play, being the road is more profitable.

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

#328
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always write them off, but I do wonder if it's more of an emotional write off or the fact that as non twitter users, they refuse to see value because they personally don't see value. I'm not a twitter user or advocate but: 106.31M 316.93M 664.89M 1.4B 2.22B That's their revenue over the past 5 years. Their R&D cost last year was over 800M. I'm not saying they are Google, I'm not saying they are LinkedIn, but t…

Are you saying that they will attain profitability at some point?

Why wouldn't they? It would seem like they could downsize below $2 billion in costs, no?

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how wood it fit in their business plan

Please use periods at the end of sentences. This is Hacker News for crying out loud.

Not sure how wood it fit in their business plan. . . . . .. ..
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