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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#321

Post by dotBen »

ungzd wrote: post #209
dotBen wrote: post #18

Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…

I imagine one day I open Twitter to read my friends tweets and get greeted with message: "Hello! Today, to make world more disrupted with innovation, we pivoted Twitter to become a sports TV channel! All your tweets are gone, instead open a bottle of beer and watch this great game! 20 well-fit males kick the leather sphere! Isn't it impressive?" That will be day when I throw out my router to the window, flush smartph…

Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable.

Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it.

FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority content area that is very brand and advertiser friendly.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#322

Post by dotBen »

rockarage wrote: post #173
dotBen wrote: post #18

Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…

Third Party Live TV content is significantly more expensive, competitive & complicated than the third party content Netflix pays for. To say it is a "greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet" is really naive, try to do little research on the market, live content is fragmented for a reason. Therefore we will need billions in cash to create a Netflix of Live TV, there are only a handful of companies(Appl…

They've managed to already for it for NFL and MLB rights, and there's plenty of cheaper rights out there and up for grabs. Netflix didn't start producing original content to begin with, but Twitter could ramp their way up to obtaining a lot of the crown jewels of sport.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#323

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jy1 wrote: post #306
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #283

I'd tear it apart until all that's left is a profitable, maintainable core. Like Craigslist. Twitter's payroll (to say nothing of its stock-based compensation expense) is bloated. Slashing staff isn't a popular play. This is a textbook private equity deal. Twitter's habit of ringing in the year with $500MM losses could be single-handedly cut with a 2/3rd staffing reduction (which costs lots in payroll and $800MM in s…

That's not a turn around scenario. It would be better to try to find a buyer at the current price.

> It would be better to try to find a buyer at the current price

It would be even better to find a buyer at ten times the current price! Unfortunately, reality isn't so pliant.

Twitter had, as of the end of 2016, $3.8bn of cash and short-term investments on their balance sheet [1]. They also have $500MM of current liabilities and $1.6bn of long-term debt. This leaves $1.7bn of "free" cash.

Excluding financing activities, Twitter's operations and investments have lost about $450MM a year for the past three years ($1.0bn in 2014, $520MM in 2015 and a net gain of $165MM in 2016). So we're talking a few years until Twitter's face meets dirt.

It's a better bet to wait than lock yourself into an unsustainable valuation.

[1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=UO...

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#324

Post by dotBen »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #214
dotBen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community. As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers. I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at s…

That's called the "Long Tail"... individual users/customers have a niche interest, but together they form a center of gravity approximately as large as the largest use cases. http://www.thelongtail.com/conceptual.jpg You have to think a little differently to design for the long tail. You can't just design one consistent experience, you have to design tools that can be used in many scenarios.

Yes, I'm familiar with the long tail ;) The problem is that Twitter has proven that it's incredibly hard to monetize this kind of content at a level that the public markets demand.

The reality is Twitter has failed as a business more than anything and this is about repositioning Twitter as a business that can be monetized.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#325

Post by enknamel »

I think Twitter could beat Reddit as the front page of the internet. They could easily expand their trending information and turn it into automated events and stories. It looks like they do this a little bit. But if they did it a lot more it would suddenly become way more interesting. Group it by hashtags or categories and you can suddenly see stories that really interest you.

That's the draw of Reddit (and even Hacker News). You immediately see what's really popular on the internet right now.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#326

Post by dotBen »

pvg wrote: post #143
dotBen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community. As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers. I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at s…

It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.

"But it is a thing"

If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#327

Post by dang »

lcnmrn wrote: post #263
dylanhassinger wrote: post #2

Get rid of the multimedia content types Revert it back to pure text, which can include any type of url Make the tweets always load chronologically Make the interface faster loading and less JavaScripty open up the API basically, turn it back into #OldTwitter from 2010

Did you open up https://sublevel.net lately? It has all of those things.

One of these comments would have been ok, especially if you added relevant substantive information. But at this point you're spamming the thread, so please stop.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#328

Post by lhnz »

zapt02 wrote: post #316
lhnz wrote: post #79

I would try to eat journalism. I would create a system where subscription to News on Twitter helps to automate payment for individual articles. 1. The lede or quote gets pulled into the tweet. 2. http://t.co becomes a payment-debiting gateway (402 Payment Required). Basically, you would monetise the audience on behalf of the publishers who would be able to make their paywalls more porous. Almost everybody would benef…

This pretty much combines the three things big media companies hate: - Someone else owning and displaying their content. - Someone else owning data on their viewers. - Not being able to set their own prices. For those reasons, I don't see any chance of serious publishers being interested in this sort of deal. There's just very little in it for them.

You wouldn't own or display their content, nor would you set their prices (you merely give them the option to collect micropayments from a central wallet). Also, all social media companies already have data on their audience - that's just the way things are.

All publishers with paywalls have massive bounce-rates due to people not wanting to subscribe. This would help them make more money.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#329

Post by patmcguire »

mindcrash wrote: post #24

* Remove Jack from CEO position * Let Evan return as CEO (merge with Medium) ... this will restore Twitter management to the situation around 2010, then ... * Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council * Restore open API access and app ecosystem * Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab) * Reverse the timeline changes * Stop pandering to far left ideologues Something like that?

Trust & Safety council is in their business interests. Harassment is an existential threat if it chases the big names off their platform.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#330

Post by mrb »

nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly?

Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

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