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Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

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Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#111

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

borgia wrote: post #26
upofadown wrote: post #22

>Twitter cut full-year revenue guidance to $2.17 billion to $2.27 billion, from the previous range of $2.3 billion to $2.35 billion. I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue. So I think that they have to be doing something very right. Perhaps everyone is anticipating the inevitable next hot thing a little bit too hard.

>I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue. Basically a short message service? That's naive. Twitter is a marketing platform with 300m people signed up to receive marketing materials, people who also readily provide the platform with the details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on, where they are in the world, what age…

> details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on

These details can only be extracted with very complex natural language processing techniques.

> where they are in the world

The vast majority of Twitter users have no structured geographic location.

> what age they are, what gender they are

Twitter doesn't even have fields to enter age and data. It's all inferred, which makes it difficult to extract accurately (if at all).

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#112

Post by caseyf7 »

As a developer, how accurate do you think Twitter's user numbers really are? There are a ton of fake accounts out there. Some are semi-legit (for development), but there are millions of followers available for purchase and Twitter has only removed a fraction compared to Facebook from my anecdotal evidence. What do you think?

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#113

Post by otterley »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #111
borgia wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue. Basically a short message service? That's naive. Twitter is a marketing platform with 300m people signed up to receive marketing materials, people who also readily provide the platform with the details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on, where they are in the world, what age…

> details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on These details can only be extracted with very complex natural language processing techniques. > where they are in the world The vast majority of Twitter users have no structured geographic location. > what age they are, what gender they are Twitter doesn't even have fields to enter age and data. It's all inferred, which makes it difficult to extract acc…

Twitter, like Facebook, has beacons on just about every website out there, thanks to website owners who are all too happy to make it easy for visitors to click "like" or "tweet" in the hopes of attracting attention. You don't even have to post a single Tweet for Twitter to know about what you're into.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#114

Post by rsync »

themagician wrote: post #84
PublicEnemy111 wrote: post #43

I think the writing is on the wall for Twitter. The younger generations are increasingly flocking to snapchat, yik yak, and similar apps. I never hear of anyone using it anymore(college student here). I would have stopped facebook a while back as well if I didn't use OAuth for damn near everything

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc… they are all just iterations of the same basic things: messaging, file (photo) sharing, identify, news. The writing is on the wall from inception. The value is in the community, but community is amorphous and not really ownable or defendable. The only real difference I've noticed in the last, lets say 15 years, is that people have grown up with things no…

You're forgetting craigslist.

Year after year, same old "ugly" site, same old boring use case.

I wish I'd thought of it.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#115

Post by nemothekid »

themagician wrote: post #84
PublicEnemy111 wrote: post #43

I think the writing is on the wall for Twitter. The younger generations are increasingly flocking to snapchat, yik yak, and similar apps. I never hear of anyone using it anymore(college student here). I would have stopped facebook a while back as well if I didn't use OAuth for damn near everything

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc… they are all just iterations of the same basic things: messaging, file (photo) sharing, identify, news. The writing is on the wall from inception. The value is in the community, but community is amorphous and not really ownable or defendable. The only real difference I've noticed in the last, lets say 15 years, is that people have grown up with things no…

Is this a trait of "internet companies" or of advertising-backed media companies in the post internet world? They all seem to sell product and its not like the New York Times has anything inherently more "defensible" than Twitter does (Brand & Scale).

And I'm not sure Facebook or Google (with its current revenue makeup) is anything other than a media company, nor have they ever not been.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#116

Post by Sideloader »

mgkimsal wrote: post #18
themodelplumber wrote: post #9

This probably shouldn't be surprising news but it has some shock value. Twitter is very close to what some would consider a model civic communications platform. I remember hearing one tech pundit refer to it as "citizen's band radio for the 21st century." The idea that such an effective tool needs to generate revenue a la Facebook seems odd, even though I understand that it operates like any other business entity.

revenue yes; profits... and perhaps even gratuitously obscene profits... probably not. but people wouldn't have invested in a "cb radio" system years ago. Wikipedia feels the need to beg every so often - not sure people would want to see that in their twitter streams, but I'm not sure who's really happy about ads either.

FWIW, the Tweetbot client (iOS) filtered out ad content by default. Haven't used it in a while, however, so this may have changed.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#117

Post by slapshot »

jessaustin wrote: post #76
SilasX wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ... someone tricked a bot into triggering an uninformed crash of the stock? Pretty clever, if true.

My understanding is that the "crash" was actually better-informed than Twitter had intended. They do have a bad earnings report, which was released sooner than they intended. Perhaps before various insiders' sell orders had a chance to complete? b^)

> which was released sooner than they intended

The major markets (NYSE, NASDAQ) require that major news be released 15 minutes before the markets open or after the markets close, to give participants time to "digest" it without racing to trade. Earnings are almost always released just after the markets close or early in the morning for this reason. E.g., here's a schedule of upcoming releases: http://www.earningswhispers.com/calendar.asp .

A major news release by the company during trading hours is supposed to trigger a 15-minute pause in trading (which we saw in Twitter's case).

It's an open question as to whether that makes sense in an era of nearly 24/7 liquidity in official and unofficial after-hours trading networks, but Twitter was likely trying to follow official protocol. It's also not clear when there's so much other near-instant trading, but the idea is that the company can at least (in theory) give a level playing field for its own news by releasing when everyone has time to read before trading.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#118

Post by austenallred »

dismal2 wrote: post #3

> “It calls into question why they didn’t see this coming,” said Victor Anthony, an analyst at Axiom Capital Management, who has a buy rating on Twitter’s stock. “I don’t think anyone ever questioned their ability to generate revenues.” Hmm, I thought everybody did? I guess wall street really does have a clear view of this whole tech scene.

>Twitter cut full-year revenue guidance to $2.17 billion to $2.27 billion, from the previous range of $2.3 billion to $2.35 billion.

I still don't question Twitter's ability to generate revenue, because they will generate over $2 Billion this year. I question their ability to meet Analyst expectations, sure, but they already have revenue. Billions of dollars of it.

They beat their earnings estimate by 57% and missed their revenue estimate by 4.7%. This is by no means the definitive death knell so many people on HN are making it out to be. Wall Street is a crazy place and expectations were sky high and yes the stock dropped a lot, but Twitter will survive and is doing just fine.

It seems like HN is convinced the company is eternally doomed and will never make money. That notion has been pretty much proven false. Twitter makes money; they're just behind where people thought they would be.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#120

Post by lucb1e »

My personal reason for using Twitter less is the degradation of the website. Using J to scroll down has always been buggy with image posts and often resets to the first post, but newest 'feature' includes not being able to view threads inline. When clicking a tweet it will go to the details page (opening in a new tab doesn't work) and when going back you have to scroll down possibly hundreds of tweets. When opening images inline (that still works in most cases) the page scrolls up a random amount, anywhere between 5 and 50 tweets it seems. Copying image URLs using right click also doesn't work anymore when viewing an image (only from the tweet list can you copy it, then manually editing the URL to include ':large' works). And of course the ads, even though I don't see them, the J key doesn't skip them so I know they're there.

Overall, the user experience becomes worse and worse. They said Twitter makes a good replacement for RSS feeds, but honestly I wish my Twitter feed was an RSS feed to be loaded in any reader I like.

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