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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#231

Post by criddell »

dirtyaura wrote: post #230
criddell wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300 employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them). At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us t…

Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that - ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers) - ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers) - ~1000 in Sales and Marketing - ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support, management, misc) If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

Every one of those numbers sounds an order of magnitude too big to me. Is it wrong to compare Twitter at 3000 people with Instagram at 20?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#232

Post by dirtyaura »

criddell wrote: post #231
dirtyaura wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that - ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers) - ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers) - ~1000 in Sales and Marketing - ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support, management, misc) If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

Every one of those numbers sounds an order of magnitude too big to me. Is it wrong to compare Twitter at 3000 people with Instagram at 20?

Yes, I think it is wrong to compare them directly. I think Twitter has room to cut employee count, but not by order of magnitude.

Instagram had 20 at the time of acquisition, I bet it's much bigger now. They had a single product, no ad tech platforms, no working business model. Twitter has multiple products and several (acquired, partly failed) ad platforms. Also Instagram were able to build on top of modern cloud technologies and scalable infrastructure services like AWS. Twitter was launched same year that AWS, so I think Twitter has paid a price by building it's own infrastructure. Instagram likely used a lot of outsourced people too to run all non-core things. Both Instagram and Whatsapp were clearly amazing, well-functioning technology teams to be able to execute with such small teams, but they were still very early in developing their revenue engines.

I think employee count and costs are not Twitter's biggest problem per se. They still have quite good financial situation, $4B in cash and equivalents, IIRC. The problem is that they haven't found a working ad model. Performance marketing has made both Google and Facebook the revenue engines that business has never seen before. Twitter could still do something similar but on the smaller scale.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#233

Post by vxNsr »

nimchimpsky wrote: post #222
vxNsr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I get[0] which is much worse. [0] http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png

much worse than what ? Its simply the tweets of the people you follow - no fluff.

Much worse than the desktop version, I can only see two tweets the info density is terrible.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#234

Post by vxNsr »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

I think I just realized how everyone who uses twitter regularly actually uses it[1]. I had no idea this existed (maybe others did...) but it's honestly 1000 times better than the official website and you get the old timeline back and following conversations is much easier, stays on one page.

[1] tweetdeck.twitter.com

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#235

Post by nimchimpsky »

vxNsr wrote: post #233
nimchimpsky wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

much worse than what ? Its simply the tweets of the people you follow - no fluff.

Much worse than the desktop version, I can only see two tweets the info density is terrible.

Its only two tweets if each tweet has a picture attached. And I can only read one thing at a time, I prefer scrolling than being bombard with ads and other shit.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#236

Post by mxschumacher »

urs2102 wrote: post #219
mxschumacher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it. Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss. Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science peop…

Great list, really heavy overlap with mine although mine is even smaller ( https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/following ). I try to do the same thing, I aggressively unfollow people and try to keep the number around the Dunbar number. I just started using Twitter about a month ago after having an account since 2009 and I'm really enjoying it (despite seeing a number of tweets about Twitter being broken). I've almost enti…

Dropping Facebook usage is a big gain to my mental well-being, a Chrome extension that has worked wonders for me is "Kill Newsfeed". https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo... I've uninstalled the Newsfeed app from my phone.
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