Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#141

Post by paulcole » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #72

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

Eliminating 3rd-party devs was only half the issue, the other half was the lack of velocity. I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.

> my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year.

There was just a discussion of a closely related topic a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314

> I think it's still pretty telling

Huh? Telling of what? That you don't have a good grasp on what's going on at Twitter?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#142

Post by sulam » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #46

trequartista wrote: post #36

Kind of surprised Facebook is not interested or at least there's no news of Facebook being interested. Facebook already owns social networking, messaging and photo-sharing. Twitter would fit nicely into this portfolio as a niche for breaking news. Plus this would be an amazing opportunity to build an integrated user profile across all these platforms. Wonder what the DOJ and the anti-trust guys would think of this th…

My understanding (at least for Europe) is that since neither Twitter or FB charges 'users', there is no market which they are considered to be monopolising. Of course they are in the advertising market, but there are not dominant there.

If Google can fall afoul of European anti-trust regulators, a tie-up of FB and TWTR absolutely would.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#143

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #97

This will get downvotes here, because many HNers somehow see value in Twitter. But I'm actually surprised that many people would bid on Twitter at anywhere close to its current valuation of ~$17 billion. Here's one reason why: Go ask any major affiliate marketing network how they feel about Twitter traffic. Many of them have an outright ban on it - meaning it actually has negative value to their advertisers. It simpl…

Means (and typically last-click based means at that) are surprisingly poor summaries of distributions.

Even if the average for Twitter users is low, there are probably pockets of value for particular services. These are potentially not the kinds of customers these affiliate networks are interested in.

Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices.

If 80% of Android devices are worth less than $10 per year, while 20% are worth $100 per year, and all iPhones are worth $100 per year, you'll have a much lower mean value for Android while also having a subset of very profitable users.

As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.

On your point on Twitter's value, I see a lot of missed opportunity.

It felt like they slowed down really early in terms of what they did (and specifically their success with their product changes). Their growth stalled at quite a low point (relative to other social networks/services), which made it hard for them to attract good people, which further compounded the effect.

But then, I never used Twitter (and maybe that's the problem).

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#144

Post by rch » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #62

wehadfun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would companies pay for access to this API?

Companies are paying a lot, the problem is that you don't have a lower tier. Just to compare, in AdWords you can pay $ 5 if you want, you are not forced to have a budget of a thousands. AdWords was revolutionary in that aspect, before them you needed to have a budget for advertising in Yahoo or other networks. I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but…

The problem with monetizing the Twitter stream is that you need rather a lot of data, often in real time, to do much of anything. So the minimum useful tier is accordingly expensive to provide.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#145

Post by ihuman » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #94

jimmytidey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service. Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation? My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties. My PhD (in progress) i…

This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat. The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols t…

> We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP

Which is funny because Facebook Chat also used to be powered by XMPP

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#146

Post by imagist » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #83

rayalez wrote: post #24

Does anybody know why they have never tried to create a premium version? I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1] I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result. Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business…

I wonder if Twitter missed out by not being Patreon. There's a proven business model of paying content creators directly and they already had one of the platform for content creators to communicate with fans.

You're proposing introducing an expense center as a solution to their profit problem?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#147

Post by sulam » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

tarancato wrote: post #86

Semi-offtopic: this is what the front page of Twitter looks like for me. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s5LeMVvmcJ0/V_UeJYgxG6I/A... There's this and two more tweets, in rotation. They are three sports-related Tweets from two years ago, with that shit image quality, and what's even more amusing: since I'm based in Spain, they believe I'm interested in Argentinian football, probably because I speak the same langua…

The logged out user experience was a topic of discussion since before I joined, and I spent over 4 years there and have been gone for almost 2. This is the real problem Twitter has internally -- lots of interest in improving things, but no intestinal fortitude to ship things, especially if they don't A/B test well. The logged out home page you see tests very well at one thing and one thing only: getting people to login. What it doesn't test well at (and no alternative demonstrated better performance at) is getting people who don't care about Twitter to try it.

My personal hypothesis is that Twitter is a ~500M user niche social network. Which sounds absurd to me, because when I started using the Internet there were ~15M people online, total. But there it is.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#148

Post by sulam » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:42 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #89

inverse_pi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their revenue is 2.2B.

Fair enough, they have some small way of monetizing, which is 400 - 500 million USD short of covering their operating cost.

I don't know if you're using the accounting terminology correctly here. Their GAAP costs are higher than revenue, but a very large percentage of that is compensation, and almost all of that compensation is stock grants. If the stock were to go to zero, the company would immediately be profitable, even if everything else stays the same.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#149

Post by sulam » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #3

I hope Twitter doesn't get acquired by Salesforce - that would destroy it.

Amusingly I left SFDC to join Twitter, and in my exit interview the VP of the group I worked in suggested to me that Salesforce might buy Twitter and I'd come back that way. At the time the proposition was absurd - Twitter was valued at $3B and clearly had a lot of growth ahead of it. And now here we are!

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#150

Post by imagist » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #77

jerf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. OK, so the advertising rates go down... so what? Advertising rates are not what a business is trying to optimize, revenue is. Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as i…

> It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would. Of course, it's all hypoth…

> Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.

It can't work worse than operating at a loss until they go out of business, which is Twitter's current trajectory.