Hearing news like this, I can't help wondering what will happen to twitter if/when the Arab Spring spreads to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
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Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "If Twitter is making money..." Is it? Doesn't seem very likely at all that it is.
I've always wondered. On the one side you get the naysayers who don't think Twitter is significantly monetizable at all. On the other side you've got the people who think the Firehose is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is pretty much a golden ticket. I don't think I get Twitter - I've never found the service to be at all useful, and I find the 140-char limit quaint and out of touch with how users want to us…
I don't see how it matters whether they have a representative sample or not, it just reduces the potential market for their data, it doesn't invalidate it completely.
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "If Twitter is making money..." Is it? Doesn't seem very likely at all that it is.
I've always wondered. On the one side you get the naysayers who don't think Twitter is significantly monetizable at all. On the other side you've got the people who think the Firehose is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is pretty much a golden ticket. I don't think I get Twitter - I've never found the service to be at all useful, and I find the 140-char limit quaint and out of touch with how users want to us…
From what I've seen twitter isn't really a social network. The majority on twitter are just consumers for the "celebrities".
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
They won't get higher prices for their stock that what people like this are willing to pay. They need a killer business model or a lot more scale to have revenues large enough to justify their valuation. Taking this kind of money keeps them in business long enough to build real revenues (or fail).
I was trying to be subtle, but still say that I find it amazing that Twitter hasn't figured out a business model yet. Anyone I've talked with any bit of knowledge has always said that they are raking in the cash selling data analysis and things like promoted tweets. That said, as other people have commented, maybe Twitter didn't have a choice in this matter. If so, that would have been an interesting phone call to li…
Go stealth yacht:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wally+yachts&hl=en&...
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "If Twitter is making money..." Is it? Doesn't seem very likely at all that it is.
I've always wondered. On the one side you get the naysayers who don't think Twitter is significantly monetizable at all. On the other side you've got the people who think the Firehose is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is pretty much a golden ticket. I don't think I get Twitter - I've never found the service to be at all useful, and I find the 140-char limit quaint and out of touch with how users want to us…
I'm not an expert on this but here's my hypothesis. People seem to use twitter for interacting with the outside world: celebs, political causes, trends, memes, etc. People use Facebook for interacting with their friends. Could it be that twitter's data is easier to mine for useful marketing information because people make tend to make more explicit connections to brands, causes etc?
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#26To those wondering if this is a secondary purchase, the keyword I see here is 'Invests'. It is very different from "Saudi Prince buys $300m worth of Twitter shares".
Buying $300m worth of Twitter stock would be an investment.
In any reasonable scenario, he is purchasing shares of stock in a company on the hopes their value will rise. Doesn't matter who he is purchasing them from, it's still an investment.
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#27To those wondering if this is a secondary purchase, the keyword I see here is 'Invests'. It is very different from "Saudi Prince buys $300m worth of Twitter shares".
I wouldn't take such nuances for granted in a random headline.
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#28Very interesting, but it really makes me wonder. If Twitter is making money, why dilute the shares with investment like this? I'm sure one response is 'so they can grow the company', but that seems like a bit of a hard sell at this point. How big does a company like Twitter really need to grow in order to be successful enough that they don't need to take $300 million investment deals? I mean, they are already the #1…
They just burning money, it'll collapse before 2015. Probably trying to bloat the cost of the company for the successful exit.
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#29Hearing news like this, I can't help wondering what will happen to twitter if/when the Arab Spring spreads to Saudi Arabia.
Exactly!
Re: Saudi prince invests $300 million in Twitter
#30How much of Twitter does that get him?
Using the $8 Billion valuation, around 3.75% of Twitter.
This concerns me about my investment as a user in Twitter. Even if it's only 3.75% of Twitter the company now owns, I don't necessarily want to support the venture of a Saudi billionaire. Maybe if they are really proponents freedom of speech and the press, it isn't such a bad thing.