If you look at the graph of the share price since IPO it doesn't exactly look as though Twitter is suddenly doing badly.
opportunity cost especially relative to other tech companies
Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
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Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#192Twitter is up by over 150% since 2016. Both are pretty useless statements without context.
The context is the original IPO share price of Twitter in 2013.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#193I think Twitter is a victim of it's niche.
It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#194After all of these decades ...
After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ...
I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions looks like this !
What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ?
It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#195They are not making money, are they?
Yes they are, they have just announced a $4B stock buyback. They are a “dividend” stock without proper dividends. Not everything needs to be a growth stock. Having said that 10% down in 10 years isn’t great, especially with where the rest of tech has gone in that time.
>isn't great
It's terrible
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#196Honestly? It's because their ads are trash. I know lots of marketing people and they all stay away from using them. Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money. Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.
I've been thinking about this because it's true from my observation, and I wonder what's the main reason:
- Is it because they are "not evil enough" compared to FB in tracking people?
- Is it because they can't track people in the same way (FB pixel is _everywhere_ on the net, Twitter's code is also widespread but probably less?)
- Is it because publisher tools are not as good as FB's? (in FB from what I know you can target various demographics really well with campaigns, based on criteria such as location, age, interests, approximated wealth etc)
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have never encountered a more hostile website I think Instagram and/or Pintrest often require you to log in before letting you see even the first picture you click on.
The Reddit mobile website might be the worst. Every aspect of it is geared to making it as annoying as possible to use so that you are forced to download their app (or go find a better 3rd party one).
old.reddit.com still works, and the day they disable it is the last day I am a Reddit user (which I have been since the YC days, as an original disaffected digg user)
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#198FB deservedly gets a lot of criticism. I personally feel Twitter doesn't get its fair share of blame. IME Twitter is the most toxic social media platform out there. Twitter deserves a fair share of blame for the divisive political culture we live in right now. I hope these companies go bankrupt and it'd be nothing but a blessing for humanity.
It really is absurd. I don't get why the focus is all on FB. I honestly only keep FB around because my family is on it, and sometimes I use FB messenger with my friends. It has zero impact on my life. On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
> On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
Definitely. It's really one of the few sites I block using my hosts file when I get a new computer.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
What killed me it was Twitter killing developers apis: no more interesting apps than theirs. It sucks big time. They're also screwing the chronology, sometimes you get the latest tweets (most interesting) and sometimes they switch you to Recommended, which, normally, it sucks. Let me browse chronologically as it was in the old days.
I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e., it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)
Facebook actually had APIs which got closed down after a couple of data-mining scandals (first these "quiz" apps and games, then Cambridge Analytica as the final nail in the coffin), and their messenger used to support federation via XMPP. IIRC that got shut down because of spam and scams.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#200As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. Their product has been incredibly stagnant for years save for the occasional feature here and there and some styling. They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out haphazardly, and they totally…
Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of user not quality of user. Because their product is the user: behavioral analytics & advertising.
If you're gonna use Twitter anyways, Twitter has zero incentive to make it a more productive tool for you (in fact they want to be slightly less productive so you spend more time on it). Due to network effects, they are not worried about competitors shipping a better product.