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

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#151

Post by downandout » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #143

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 wo…

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

I disagree that it's different. Of course there are pockets of both value and worthlessness everywhere, but overall the LTV of an Android user to developers and advertisers is a small fraction of that of an ioS user, and a Twitter user is worth (to advertisers) an even smaller fraction of the value of a Facebook user.

At scale, averages are what count.

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

I did notice that, and I cannot disagree with you there. But currently, for many advertisers, last-click based means is the most efficient available attribution model, even though I agree that it's far from perfect.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#152

Post by ng12 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

imagist wrote: post #146

ng12 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Huh? I mean, yes. Leverage your platform to build things that make money.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#153

Post by iainmerrick » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

I absolutely agree with your sentiment, but how could they have become the "defacto messaging backbone" and made money at the same time? What should their business plan have been?

It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#154

Post by criddell » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #138

paulmd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having looked at this in some detail, my feeling is that no federated solution can work. The reason is that the underlying architecture leaks through to the user experience in unacceptable ways. As soon as a user has to understand federation - at all - I believe the proposition is dead to most people. For example Diaspora's 'pods' are, I think, fatally confusing. (I think Zuckerberg realised this, which is why he don…

> no federated solution can work

I don't see why not. Is the problem fundamentally different than SMS messaging or email?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#155

Post by sushid » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

omouse wrote: post #45

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…

Twitter should be owned as a worldwide co-operative at this point, it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.

This is hilarious to me. If you find something valuable, your proposal is to take it and have it "owned by the world?" And I thought our presidential candidate were bad.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#156

Post by iainmerrick » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

true_religion wrote: post #78

aembleton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.

Charge people who build applications that use it in any significant way beyond sending text messages through the Twitter approved interface.

Would the pricing be per app, or per user?

If you charge per user, it's unaffordable for small developers (unless they push the cost on to their users).

If you charge per app, you won't make enough money for it to be worthwhile.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#157

Post by tarancato » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

ihuman wrote: post #145

paulmd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I doubt it, they had an XMPP interface, but that doesn't mean they use XMPP in the backend

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#158

Post by criddell » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

rch wrote: post #144

wslh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The depressing thing for me is to know that when they show me a Starbucks ad, Twitter makes pennies for that. I would much rather just pay those pennies myself and not see ads.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#159

Post by criddell » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

aembleton wrote: post #54

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…

How would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.

GPS is out there for anybody to use for free. It's incredibly useful and the value to the economy of having that there as a utility anybody can use is huge.

Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#160

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

fasteddie wrote: post #128

theli0nheart wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue. Given the paucity of people I know who've made a purchasing decision based off of an ad on Twitter, I seriously doubt that.

Few people think they know others that have made purchase decisions based on online ads, yet here we have a hundred billion dollar worldwide online ad industry.

> yet here we have a hundred billion dollar worldwide online ad industry.

... which is plagued with spam and fraud. Victims are both the advertisers (who pay for ad slots that are viewed/clicked by bots) and the consumers (who suffer from malware ads, un-usable websites because there are 30+ trackers, ad brokers etc. on one single site, and higher product prices because the vendors have to pay for ads). The only ones who profits are the countless middle men - ad brokers and "big data analysis/retargeting" companies which kill user privacy on a global scale while providing next to zero value.

We should, once and for all, simply massively regulate advertising and re-think about how we as a society fund the services currently funded by ads. Especially in media, where "real" journalism had to step back in favor of ever more clickbait crap...