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Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
201–210 of 444 posts
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#202So I never created a Twitter account. Over the years, there are a few people that I liked to read their thoughts on Twitter, so I'd manually go to their wall and read occasionally. They're all verified. Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediat…
Same experience except I discovered that, at least on iOS, browsing in a private window still works to go to an individual user’s feed. It’s just a matter of time before they close that loophole and I too go away. FWIW, I do pay many of the people I manually follow on Twitter, but through substack or PayPal.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#203If you look at the graph of the share price since IPO it doesn't exactly look as though Twitter is suddenly doing badly.
Since inception, Twitter is down 10.4%.
Starting at the same time (Oct 3, 2013), S&P 500 is up 153.45% and the NASDAQ is up 260.30%
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#204They 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.
Even flat for 10 years isn't great.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how can you blame Twitter for the divisive political culture when “we” are the ones generating the content? I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture. I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.
The problem is that these sites have optimized their algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they don't care if positive or toxic. At least that's what FB does, dunno about Twitter tbh.
> The problem is that these sites have optimized their algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they don't care if positive or toxic.
Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their algorithms work very differently.
Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a stressful day.
On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to more stress in my case.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#206It beggars belief that people don't think the numbers from any of these companies are completely fraudulent. Has anyone been on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
While there may be a flood of bots and sock puppet accounts, it’s worth noting that advertisers wouldn’t be spending if they couldn’t see actual conversions from Twitter ads. So there are at least enough real people on there for their advertising business to work.
That's not necessarily totally true. The advertising world is susceptible to FOMO just as much as other people. Companies authorize their ad agencies to come up with a campaign and agree on an ad spend for that year/campaign. That money gets split up to cover as many markets as possible. If a competitor is spending on Twitter, then you spend on Twitter as well. You can't give the competitor the entire Twitter market.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#207I don’t understand why platforms like Twitter don’t make money the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a different profile shape (octogonal instead of a circle), or a special banner or label, or any other cosmetics. That has been very successful for multiplayer games since more than a decade, people love to pay to show their cool new cosmetic. Let people pay for cool set of emotes. Or different colors, etc.
That doesn’t require ads, is optional, and works well in a social context.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only once you compare the performance of Twitter to other tech shares and realize the last 12 years were the biggest tech bull market in history. And Twitter shows zero return.
To put it in perspective, if you invested $10k in TWTR in 2013, I invested $10k in GOOG, and Mary invested $10k in AMZN - you'd have $9k, I'd have $55k, and Mary would have $90k
Those ratios are too close to Jesus's "Parable of the Talents". (A "Talent" was a huge sum of silver in the Biblical / Roman days). One investor brought back 10 Talents, another brought back 5, and one brought back 1.
Probably just a coincidence to to round numbers and such, but it amuses me.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#209Twitter is up by over 150% since 2016. Both are pretty useless statements without context.
The context of "since IPO" for a company that's been public for almost a decade, in the tech business.
In fact, what other tech stock valued at double digit billions has had such a flat valuation for its whole lifetime, yet still survived?
Yes, a range of ~14-77, but it's neither taken off nor crashed.
Look at any other survivor and they'll be shaped more like Oracle, Cisco, FB&NFLX (well, recent troubles aside)
Look at them all over the last 9 years. Twitter stands out to me.
I dunno, maybe there are many big tech companies following the same pattern. But none of them are this high profile, so Twitter is the odd one out.
Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
#210Like Instagram and others they have gotten quite hostile to visitors without an account. I guess tracking and monetizing your users earns a lot more than displaying ads for everyone.
Well with France making it illegal to use Google analytics, I expect many more websites to move forward with forcing you to login. They force you to have an account, which makes you agree to them tracking you, and they'll use you being logged in to track that. When they can use third party analytics it's not as important, but still obviously a plus to them to have people have an account.
*making it illegal to use Google Analytics because GA moves identifying data to the US. Tracking with an account doesn't solve this. Let's not be reductive.