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Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#111

Post by ThrustVectoring »

ProAm wrote: post #3

They would be profitable in an instant if they'd get rid of half their employees? Im not sure why they need SO many people for Twitter. I believe they have over 4000, they could easily get by with 1000

It's because they need the headcount to speculatively try to achieve the growth numbers needed to support their valuation.

Suppose they cut back to just keeping the lights on in engineering, along with obviously-profitable sales staff to sell advertisements and make business deals. Twitter is instantly profitable, but the net present value of those cash flows is something like a third to a tenth of their current valuation.

This is what happens when you over-fund a business at too high of a valuation. They do what they can to try to "grow into" the valuation, because otherwise management's junior equity positions and stock options are worthless.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#112

Post by PatientTrades »

> and ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies

Which companies are buying this data? Considering its estimated that a third (1/3) of twitter activity is from bots retweeting, liking, and following. Not sure how much real value there actually is in this data. Twitter may turn a profit, but there are bigger issues with their model

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#113

Post by bazoiks »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #76
samcheng wrote: post #5

It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter. Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.

And thus why he will never have violated the ToS. He could openly threaten to murder someone and Twitter would not suspend him. (Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.)

Didn't they suspend Milo for suggesting a female actress was ugly?

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#114

Post by sanderjd »

jjeaff wrote: post #86
a13n wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

Although few have any experience operating at that scale, one can make comparisons. I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees. So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.

You don't see how person to person and small group messaging is a more difficult engineering challenge than personalized feed multicast? It's also simpler to sell subscriptions than to sell targeted ads - there's at least one whole other product we don't see, which Twitter's advertisers use, and it's probably a few different ones for different sizes and kinds of advertisers. Clearly, there's also a whole group working on the firehose product discussed elsewhere in this thread.

I don't know anything about Twitter's business, but just in general, I agree with your parent commenter that this entire thread of conversation (which happens every single time) is embarrassingly arrogant.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#115

Post by hobofan »

ProAm wrote: post #63
a13n wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality show presidential candidate and might have their first profitable moment after 10 years of existence. Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and e…

"Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that it will destroy our future profitability"

Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#116

Post by krick »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #67
c3534l wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone did a linguistic analysis and demonstrated that there are two writers of Trump's tweets. Trump's were all the crazy ones, his handler's were all of the moderate ones and the ones that walked back what was said previously.

You didn't even need to do that previously. Just hit the API and look if it originated on iOS or Android.

So does Trump use Android or iOS?

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#117

Post by forgot-my-pw »

vonnik wrote: post #104
samcheng wrote: post #5

It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter. Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.

Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their stock goes up, the market should dive.

They should just make a bot like Microsoft and let it loose.

Edit:

- For the uninformed: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

- Archives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tay_Tweets/top/?sort=top&t=all

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#118

Post by CodeCube »

hvmonk wrote: post #95
samcheng wrote: post #5

It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter. Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.

Yeah, i'd not be surprised if he holds TWTR stocks :)

Are the president's holdings a matter of public record (I honestly don't know)?

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#119

Post by mv4 »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #103

Can I also say one more thing without getting downvoted? A good reason why their stock is rallying today is also because of their ban on Russian Ad dollars going forward. Something that Mark could not do at Facebook.

Mark made much more, and would never release that. He chose to very publicly implement various fake news detection tools instead.

This one here was a token gesture, a rounding error.

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