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Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

cnbc.com

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Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#241

Post by JBReefer »

jmfayard wrote: post #162
speeder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the same Arab Spring that sparked 4 or 5 civil wars (depending how you count), led to the rise of IS, and in the civil wars aftermaths caused more civil wars in neighbor countries that were invaded by foreign guerrilla fighters? When I made some napkin calculations some time ago, Arab Spring and its fallout so far killed about 300.000 people and displaced millions. Is the positive non monetary value enough t…

Sorry but I call bullshit on saying that "the arab spring" is the cause of ISIS and the syrian war. The sectarian corrupt violent syrian state and the U.S. invasion of Irak are much better suspects

The Arab Spring revolution became the Syrian Civil War, which became IS. Don't take away the agency of people in other countries to be evil, just because you believe the US is.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#242

Post by sorenjan »

At the end of 2015 Twitter had 3900 employees [0]. Why would they need close to that? How many could a new owner fire without noticeably affecting the day to day operations?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#243

Post by jhall1468 »

astrodust wrote: post #234
imagist wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number I cited was their claimed active users. I'm not sure why you consider $29 per human user a steal. There are two sides to a transaction--what you pay and what you get for it. What exactly do you think investors are getting for their money here?

Just compared to other industry metrics.

So you pulled it out of thin air?

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#244

Post by jhall1468 »

jldugger wrote: post #126
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #82

Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if Twitter's fate is being decided and played out in the media via endless speculation? It is not like Twitter is a tiny company with an unknown brand, few users and no possibility of improving its profit margins. I am not aware of what they are trying to do, but at the same time it is not as if they could have exhau…

> Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if ... Is this just impatience from stockholders? Money doesn't grow on trees, and Facebook has lost a half billion dollars every year. They have maybe four years left at that rate before they run out of cash on hand. The numbers are improving by about 20 percent a year, which, if projected forward, means they'll s…

> They have maybe four years left at that rate before they run out of cash on hand. The numbers are improving by about 20 percent a year, which, if projected forward, means they'll stop losing money in ... four years.

That's not accidental, that's called burn rate.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#245

Post by astrodust »

jhall1468 wrote: post #243
astrodust wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just compared to other industry metrics.

So you pulled it out of thin air?

No. Look at the citations others have made within this thread. A rule of thumb is generally anywhere from $50 to $200 per head for social network type applications. See also: Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, etc.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#246

Post by danohu »

imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

Their annual revenue is about $6 per user [1]. The problem isn't absolute failure to monetize, it's massive costs. If you thought you could run twitter without their ~4000 employees, you might have a chance of pulling some cash out of there.

The problem is, it's hard to simultaneously clamp down on costs and push for growth. In SV, anything other than growth is an admission of failure. If you aren't flinging money into R&D, everyone will assume it's the start of a downward spiral.

[That, and you can't buy twitter without outbidding all the True Believers]

[1] http://www.viewproxy.com/twitter/2016/2/annualreport2015.pdf

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#247

Post by mhermher »

rrggrr wrote: post #211
scosman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful conflating "never made a profit" with not having a business. They made $710M in revenue last quarter, up 48% yoy. Their expenses might be high, but they can address that. Companies like Amazon didn't make a profit for years, and are rightfully quite valuable in the eyes of the market. A $29 valuation per MAU is low if anything. Facebook is almost 10x that (and deserves to be). Early stage startups often ge…

Not all users are equal. A newsmaker, world leader, reporter, gatekeeper is worth MUCH more than $29.

How about bots? Isn't there number of users tainted by bots? I figure theit value is near $0.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#249

Post by fabiandesimone »

To me Twitter has always been real time news.

Why haven't they worked on a way to 'validate' tweets around a story, I can't understand it (from a biz perspective, not technically).

With validation they become, instantly, the #1 news agency in the world.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#250

Post by sp527 »

Seeing a lot of arguments about profitability that don't make sense. At Twitter scale, profit sensitivity to even minor tweaks in ad rate/targeting/placement is massive. They could also go into 'maintenance mode' tomorrow and break a massive profit (it would just be stupid).

Active users is a poor metric for Twitter. It's much more about the views. A relatively smaller number of people on Twitter can command an outsized influence. It's a fundamentally different kind of network.

Twitter's future will probably be more about monetizing its viewership. It's definitely not going to disappear anytime soon.

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