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Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

wsj.com

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Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#161

Post by criddell »

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…

Twitter is hurting affiliate marketing networks? I would say it's the other way around.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#162

Post by LeoPanthera »

paulmd wrote: post #126
otterley wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose to prevent spam and abuse of this open federated chat network?

Realistically it would have to work the same way as spam filtering does for email. Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.

SMS spam is common in Europe.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#163

Post by criddell »

jondubois wrote: post #95

Twitter only makes sense for public figures. For regular people, nobody on Twitter gives a crap about what you have to say. Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional). To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read ot…

When you publish something, how do you let your followers know about it? Have you ever compared how much traffic your RSS feed generates compared to your tweets?

On the flipside, how do you discover things?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#164

Post by criddell »

gjolund wrote: post #107

I'm constantly surprised that people still use twitter. Whoever buys them is going to be taking on a lot of dead weight.

I think it depends on the intentions of the buyer. If they think they can grow like Facebook, I think they are screwed.

On the other hand, if they work from the assumption that Twitter is done growing and now it's time to focus on existing users rather than potential users, they might do okay, depending on the purchase price.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#165

Post by spike021 »

the_watcher wrote: post #110
jondubois wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself. I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).

It doesn't make sense until you find an active community around a topic you are truly interested in. The NBA is what sucked me in, and it remains 95% of the reason I used Twitter (the other 5% is for when customer service is unresponsive to my chats or emails)

Mostly the same for me, except baseball. I get to follow teams, reporters, and players. I learn about charities the players are involved in, statistical reports on the sport and games themselves, etc. It's pretty useful.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#166

Post by swasheck »

mc32 wrote: post #68
proksoup wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

It's where famous and infamous people go to boast and to brownnose each other and score points. It's a forum to continue high school style social interaction (peer pressure and peer approvals) Or, as nirvana said, territorial pissings. It's also good as a breaking news medium.

I agree with most of your assessment and would add that I find that so much "meaningful content" is now almost required to be packaged and "sold" as a Twitter bite. So much meaningful and necessary content is not reducible to 140 characters, but gets overlooked because it wont garner the social points that it needs to make the poster "popular" or the content recognized.

Even our political campaigns are now reduced to tweet wars, and platforms seem to need to be (lossy) compressed into 140 characters, or maybe 3 if it's very important. If you have a string of longer than 3 tweets, you lose a majority of your audience.

Twitter is a good tool, but simply should not be the de facto anything other than short messaging, in my opinion.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#167

Post by Klathmon »

criddell wrote: post #158
rch wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel a bit like a shill because of how much I bring it up, but checkout Google Contributor[0].

It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded.

It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going.

I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015

[0]https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#168

Post by [deleted] »

blackaspen wrote: post #139
Alex3917 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your startup has over 300 million users? Operating at scale is functionality that requires a lot more work than a lot of people sometimes realize.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#169

Post by Alex3917 »

oldmanjay wrote: post #80
Alex3917 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mostly it tells us that you don't have any visibility into twitter and have conflated end-user features with engineering output.

"Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside"

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#170

Post by criddell »

Klathmon wrote: post #167
criddell wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel a bit like a shill because of how much I bring it up, but checkout Google Contributor[0]. It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded. It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a goo…

I signed up for $5 / month, but I also run an adblocker for performance and security reasons. I don't usually use the $5.
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