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Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

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Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#251

Post by user5994461 »

jusben1369 wrote: post #100
artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

Hah. I think patio11 just joined Stripe, one of the fastest growing startups around :) Anyway, besides many of the usual answers, talent is a key one often forgotten. People want the chance to do new and ever changing things so as to be challenged. It's hard to retain good people when they know it's going to be a smaller company with modest growth. What often kills companies with slowish growth is that they lose thei…

> What often kills companies with slowish growth is that they lose their best people to other companies with a more dynamic environment.

Till the best people get tired of stuff everchanging and breaking, combined with the lack of resources and the 70 hours startup week.

Then they drop the 'dynamic environment' and come back to Big Goompany :D

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#252

Post by nl »

cookiecaper wrote: post #143
josep2 wrote: post #117

Twitter is by far the #1 service I use everyday. It's been the most valuable to me from a networking perspective where I've made friends and professional connections. I also happen to be a shareholder. It's been disappointing to watch Twitter try to become a business and completely falling flat. The acquisition of Vine and Periscope haven't led to much and the user growth from Live video is still t be seen. The produ…

Twitter needs to find a frictionless way to get paid by their regular users that most users won't notice or think much about. Several potentials exist: can charge to follow additional users above a certain threshold; can charge to expand publishing platform (i.e., to be followed by more than a certain quantity of users); can have "premium channel"-style users that only paid members can follow (this may also be a way…

Advertising is a great model.

Twitter's problem is that their ads don't work very well (compared to Google and FB), and their audience isn't growing.

Both of these things are solvable.

It isn't at all clear why people think there needs to be a new model. Advertising has worked well for hundreds of years (newspapers/radio/tv/internet) but it needs an audience. Twitter nearly has this.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#253

Post by forgetsusername »

aub3bhat wrote: post #244
makomk wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the investors will get tired of subsidising the other company, it will get more and more user-hostile and quite possibly run out of money altogether and shut down, and users will be worse off in the long run.

Oh yeah and eventually Diaspora will overtake Facebook. Oh wait... If the VC model did not work it would have simply gone out of business. The reality of business is that doing things at larger scale requires capital. Sure you might be able to pull-off your lifestyle, but its going to be hard to motivate employees when the VC funded competitor gives them michelin star chefs, 50% higher salaries and a shot at windfall…

But before that it made its founders billionaires and several employees millionaires.

Without ever earning a penny in profit for its shareholders. What a system!

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#254

Post by janeFondler »

artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

Because Twitter has received investment on the promise of eventual profit.

A low / no growth model is only feasible if they don't have investors / shareholders bucking for returns at every decision point. Twitter, has made a deal with the devil in becoming a publicly traded company because at some point needs to show their stakeholders a path to profitability. Job cuts, cutting expenditure whilst hopefully maintaining profits, are a good way to demonstrate this.

If Twitter wants to become a public internet utility, like wikipedia, existing investors will demand something like a share buyback, how will Twitter afford this without a period of profitability?

Finding a sugar daddy to buy them out is one option but the recent sutors probably felt that twitter stock is overvalued, largely because of the lack of profits.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#255

Post by nl »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #31

Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is how does Twitter make money? I mean real money. Not valuation of eyeballs, not VC cash, but honest to God profit? It has always baffled me and I wish I knew what the unicorns say to the VC's when (hopefully) someone asks this question.

Twitter makes ~$530M/quarter from advertising and ~$70M/quarter from selling bulk access to the Twitter data stream.

These are revenue, not profit numbers. They spend a lot on people.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#256

Post by ghuntley »

mrmondo wrote: post #246

I don't really have any insightful input into this other than to say, I hope they're cutting the people they most likely don't need. Twitter is the only social platform I actually like and still use, and the only thing that could replace it would be similar but decentralised and as widely adopted. Why / where are they failing - are they failing? I know more people on and using Twitter than ever, many of those have le…

Agree. I would happily pay $50 to $100 a year just to keep the twitter experience as-is.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#257

Post by [deleted] »

joshdickson wrote: post #219
rattray wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per employee. What's all that money for?

Marketing, running the service and data centers, office space, research and development, capex, etc, etc. Running companies is expensive beyond just the salaries.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#258

Post by system16 »

jqueryin wrote: post #226

One of Twitter's problem is not properly controlling their feed. I never use their mobile or web client. I solely use a highly customized Tweetdeck. With this experience, I never once see an advertisement. That's a huge loss for Twitter. Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't have a problem seeing advertisements in my Tweetdeck feed if it meant they'd remain successful. I'd much rather see Twitter succeed as it's the o…

What's bizarre is I thought the whole purpose of cutting off/restricting third-party clients was so that they could control what was in the feed i.e., serve advertisements.

If they still allow some/limited third-party clients and don't force ads into those feeds, what was the point of burning their bridges with the developer community?

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#259

Post by nl »

meowface wrote: post #163
rodgerd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many people does it really take to run Twitter? Given that the Salesforce buyout fell over because Salesforce didn't want to be associated with the alt-rightists and other assorted neo-Nazis running around the service, apparently more people in their abuse team than they currently have.

Do you have a source on that rationale for Salesforce backing out?

It's been pretty widely reported.

This is a good summary:

Twitter's reputation as a haven for trolls was one of the key reasons both Disney and Salesforce declined to make bids for Twitter, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC host Jim Cramer.... the family-friendly animation giant had even hired two investment banks to work out a bid for the service, but eventually decided not to put a deal on the table, fearing that Twitter's sexist, racist, and otherwise unpleasant abusers would sully Disney's image..... Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had expressed concerns about Twitter's problems with user abuse directly to him. "What's happened is, a lot of the bidders are looking at people with lots of followers and seeing the hatred," Cramer said, claiming that Salesforce was "very concerned about this notion."

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13328380/twitter-abuse-di...

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#260

Post by gaius »

aub3bhat wrote: post #247
_wp3r wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest that Twitter is a niche. It is in a brand management and customer engagement niche, and without some giant platform change, I think that trying to profit by increasing the number of eyeballs is always going to be challenging to the bottom line if the business value does not dramatically increase. The noise in twitters ecosystem from all those users, while interesting and good for research data sets, w…

Twitter a billion dollar company, a social network used by presidential candidates and tens of millions of people is a niche?? Do you understand the dictionary meaning of the term "niche" if anything Twitter is opposite of it.

The entirety of Twitter is a subset of one feature of Facebook - that's why its referred to as niche.
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