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Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

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Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#171

Post by [deleted] »

LordHumungous wrote: post #64
h4nkoslo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As to the first, without seeing their internals, they might simply not have enough ad volume from more niche advertisers to cater to such customers. Everyone loves "brand" advertising because the decision to, say, buy a Chevy is essentially unattributable, and they spend a lot on ads to achieve saturation. By contrast, small "product" advertisers might actually expect to see ROI. They are leaving an enormous amount o…

Well that's kind of a chicken and egg thing though. If they don't have the features that make for effective ad targeting, then small advertisers don't see ROI.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#172

Post by teej »

xenadu02 wrote: post #139

I still maintain that screwing over client developers had something to do with it. At the very least it didn't help them "control the twitter experience". Every time I see one of their new ads about how much Twitter loves developers I laugh out loud. There is zero chance I'll ever integrate Twitter into anything I do, period. I'll fight against it anywhere I work and encourage all my peers to do the same. Did everyon…

They didn't invent the hashtag either.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#173

Post by ricksplat »

I'm just back from a holiday in south east Asia. All the time I was there I was getting ads on twitter targetted to the local market (in the local language) presumably based on my roaming IP.

Maybe my grasp is a bit simplistic but isn't this just intensely stupid? My twitter profile is explicitly Western European is twitter's location based advertising really just as dumb as matching IP addresses to regions?

If I were an advertiser I wouldn't be too happy about twitter claiming 'impressions' like this.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#174

Post by kbart »

nestlequ1k wrote: post #160
xenadu02 wrote: post #139

I still maintain that screwing over client developers had something to do with it. At the very least it didn't help them "control the twitter experience". Every time I see one of their new ads about how much Twitter loves developers I laugh out loud. There is zero chance I'll ever integrate Twitter into anything I do, period. I'll fight against it anywhere I work and encourage all my peers to do the same. Did everyon…

I feel the same way. I stopped using Twitter after that betrayal and never bothered to come back to it. Don't know if it made the difference to hurting their business, but I feel they missed out on something big by losing developer mindshare.

What "betrayal" are you talking about? I've never used Twitter, so my knowledge lacks a little.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#175

Post by danieltillett »

edoceo wrote: post #165
danieltillett wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a bootstrapped SAAS business and I make far more than $20K a month profit and have done so for years. The key is choose a niche that is large enough to make the level of profit you want, but too small to attract VC funded competitors. The sort of market size you want is in the range of $5 to $20 million per year. Big enough to be worth the hassle, but too small to attract the big guys.

Similar story, we should be friends :) Care to comment on the work/life balance you have?

Well I work hard, but I live a very good life. I enjoy my work (well most of it as I am not too keen on accounting and taxes). I get to work and live in a very nice (if expensive) part of the world so I have nothing to complain about.

I can say it took me a long time to get to where I am now and I had quite a few detours along the way. I wrote up the history of my business a while back if anyone is interested [1]. Bootstrapping is certainly not the way to instant riches :)

1. https://www.tillett.info/2015/06/24/why-i-kept-my-startup-in...

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#176

Post by rs999gti »

artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

> why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually?

Public companies have investors and those investors who have put in capital (money or time) either in the beginning or during operations expect a return on their investment. The company taking the investment keeps selling shares to get more capital getting them stuck on a ROI treadmill.

The only way to escape the ROI treadmill is to self-fund from operations profits and not take outside investments.

Unfortunately many of these startups depend on debt to keep operations going.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#177

Post by kbart »

bluthru wrote: post #166

Twitter should have a tweet quota and charge people who tweet too much. People who chase hashtags and reply with reaction gifs have turned it into low-brow garbage.

I'm pretty sure tweet count is used as a growth metric somewhere, so it's not gonna happen.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#178

Post by xyzzy4 »

kbart wrote: post #174
nestlequ1k wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I stopped using Twitter after that betrayal and never bothered to come back to it. Don't know if it made the difference to hurting their business, but I feel they missed out on something big by losing developer mindshare.

What "betrayal" are you talking about? I've never used Twitter, so my knowledge lacks a little.

IIRC, they changed their policies and APIs to being much more restrictive against 3rd party apps. Something to do with rate limits maybe.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#179

Post by teej »

kbart wrote: post #174
nestlequ1k wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I stopped using Twitter after that betrayal and never bothered to come back to it. Don't know if it made the difference to hurting their business, but I feel they missed out on something big by losing developer mindshare.

What "betrayal" are you talking about? I've never used Twitter, so my knowledge lacks a little.

After years of being increasingly hostile to 3rd party developers, Twitter finally decided that you needed their permission to have more than 100k users of your twitter client. That announcement was bundled with tightened rate limiting and stricter controls over how you could display tweets. This was the final stake in the coffin for many Twitter clients.

https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-o...

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#180

Post by system16 »

Apart from killing their third-party ecosystem, I think Twitter's biggest failure has been their inability to monetize their huge celebrity and brand base, and I wonder if this partly has to do with their "verified account" system. How to charge celebrities/brands without pissing everyone off?

Top-tier celebrities and brands can and would easily fork out high fees to use Twitter. But Twitter can't just charge some blanket fee to verified accounts because right now, "verified accounts" are not exclusive enough. They also include "key influencers", bloggers, industry people, other hangers-on (let's call them Group B) and they can't/won't support the high fees and would revolt.

Twitter could try and create a new way to categorize celebs/brands, but that would confuse things and may make Group B users feel less elite: so they'd revolt as well.

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