Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#131

Post by mayneack » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 3:31 PM UTC

z-e-r-o wrote: post #125

lucb1e wrote: post #120

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 i…

I started using https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ especially for the above reasons. Somehow the JS is way more reliable on the tweetdeck site. It's a pity that even the widest column setting is way too narrow, it still feels more like a "management interface" than a Twitter home feed.

does tweetdeck have ads?

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#132

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

interesting_att wrote: post #94

Did anyone expect any different from Twitter? Their main platform needs significant improvement. Biggest disadvantages for Twitter: 1) People are flocking to other social messaging apps, especially the mobile variants (Snapchat, Instagram, etc). I suspect because its coolness factor is waring off, because of rampant trolling, and poor discovery. 2) Most of Twitter advertising is useless, in large part due to poor dat…

Interesting about 75% of the ads I see on Twitter are for products that I might actually be interested in. This is way higher than e.g Facebook (which seems to think I want to play a free to pay game or sign up for bad dating sites or get my degree again) which suggest to me that Twitter is doing something right and it can't be data collection because Facebook knows so much about me (including that I graduated from the very place they wanted me to get the degree, with that exact degree).

What may be happening is that the ads on Twitter are better targeted to technical users.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#133

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 3:43 PM UTC

lotsofmangos wrote: post #60

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…

I like Stewart Lee's take on it. "a government surveillance operation run by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation”

That is a rip of of the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#134

Post by erikpukinskis » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #128

austenallred wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Twitter is incapable of ever meeting the Price-Sales multiple of 20X+ until the stock drops closer to reality. The average stock is less than 2X. Apple is around 3X and has never in it's history been greater than 7X. What can Twitter do to multiply their sales by 5X? It's great they make some money but the stock price is unrealistic.

Apple is a bad comparison because the near-death-experience in the 90s combined with its contrarian attitude has put it in on a very short leash with Wall Street. I mean, aside from its years in the desert Apple has performed as well and as consistently as any tech company over long stretches. And yet it's P/E is consistently a third of Google's or Sony's.

And it literally won the war. They take the lions share of profits in the personal computer market and they have a huge moat. You could argue they will be in trouble when personal computing devices stop changing so quickly and are fully commodified, but I can't imagine that's within the next two decades. Honestly I find it weird their P/E isn't higher.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#135

Post by spullara » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #91

spullara wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that through gnip.com, which they own. It isn't close to their advertising revenue.

No, you can't. It's not for small business where you can spend only USD 5 per day.

A small business can probably get by with using the streaming track API or the sample hose which is available to everyone. Not sure what an SMB would even do with the firehose.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#136

Post by lotsofmangos » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 6:49 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #133

lotsofmangos wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Stewart Lee's take on it. "a government surveillance operation run by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation”

That is a rip of of the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

Is a different take on a similar joke - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XpvH-j9BHg

The idea that social networks are useful for surveillance and the joke that the users are just useful idiots, massively predates the onion sketch as well though.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#137

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 6:54 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #128

austenallred wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Twitter is incapable of ever meeting the Price-Sales multiple of 20X+ until the stock drops closer to reality. The average stock is less than 2X. Apple is around 3X and has never in it's history been greater than 7X. What can Twitter do to multiply their sales by 5X? It's great they make some money but the stock price is unrealistic.

Twitter is just now figuring out what business they are really in: content distribution. They thought they were a social network, but social networking is just how they source their talent and content.

Their homepage redesign, which just launched, is the first step toward what could be huge growth. Evaluation of the company will shift from active users to passive audience. Twitter ads can reach them both just fine, and there are way more passive watchers than tweeters.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#138

Post by themagician » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 7:39 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #114

themagician wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I forgot a few things. CL is definitely one of them.

Another thing I left out, which I feel is novel, is the wiki. IMO the wiki is one of the few "new" things. When you really think about the wiki it's pretty different form a message board or co-editing a website. It's something else.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#139

Post by themagician » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 7:43 PM UTC

alphapapa wrote: post #107

themagician wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think your comment is quite insightful. Just think about how many times instant messaging has shifted from one most-popular platform to another. IRC, ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype...SMS?...Facebook?...WhatsApp? It's just a constant shift from one service to the next. Obviously this cycling will continue forever. Therefore it would seem unwise to invest in any one platform too heavily, if at all--as a user or an investor.

It makes sense to invest, I think. Notice, I'm not saying that these things aren't valuable—they are. It's just that their value is time limited. They add the bulk of their value between date X and Y, and it just decays after that. And after their value has been delivered, if they disappeared entirely the world really wouldn't be any different.

If tomorrow their was no more Facebook I don't feel like it would be a big deal for more than a week or so. After a few hours everyone would have a new solution for photos, messaging, etc.. After a month no one would care anymore.

As an investor I think the thing is to get in early, help built that valuable moment in time in peoples' lives, and then just get out.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#140

Post by themagician » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 7:46 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #115

themagician wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there's anything wrong with media companies. They are sustainable over a longer period of time, they just aren't particularly interesting.

I can easily see Facebook going the way of AOL. In a few years a new generation will grow up with something new that seems easier and more intuitive to them, and Facebook becomes a legacy platform. Maybe they buy a few small media companies that keep the newsfeed interesting.

I just can't see Facebook, Twitter or anything else being "the thing" on a sustainable basis. There's no precedent for that, and it really doesn't make sense to me intuitively.