Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#61

Post by mrweasel » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #47

mrweasel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It you can't monetise it, then how valuable it that data really? It doesn't matter how valuable your product is, if no one is willing to pay. Perhaps the gossip magazines should pool their money and buy Twitter?

Monetisation usually implies end users paying for a product. I don't think Twitter will ever get to that point. But a media company like Disney (who, remember, own ESPN) could absolutely capitalise on the value of Twitter for live sports, for example. It would be valuable to them .

Couldn't they do that now... for free? What's the benefit to buying Twitter? If it's due to missing functionality they could probably just pay Twitter to implement the features they're missing and it would be cheaper than buying them outright, while providing a safety net in case it fails.

Right now you're suggesting that e.g. Disney is buying Twitter, for 17 billion dollars, to implement an untested business case. The cost of failure in that case is at least the purchase price of Twitter, that seems like a massive gamble.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#62

Post by wslh » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

wehadfun wrote: post #28

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

How much would companies pay for access to this API?

Companies are paying a lot, the problem is that you don't have a lower tier. Just to compare, in AdWords you can pay $ 5 if you want, you are not forced to have a budget of a thousands. AdWords was revolutionary in that aspect, before them you needed to have a budget for advertising in Yahoo or other networks.

I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#63

Post by bernardlunn » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

omouse wrote: post #45

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

Twitter should be owned as a worldwide co-operative at this point, it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.

But it is too expensive now for that route

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#64

Post by inverse_pi » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #22

Why would anyone want to buy Twitter? Sure they have a great brand, loyal fans, but pretty much no way to monetizing them. It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Their revenue is 2.2B.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#65

Post by bernardlunn » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

aembleton wrote: post #54

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

How would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.

It would let the apps on top figure that out and they take a rev share

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#66

Post by proksoup » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #59

proksoup wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

They could have kept the 140-char service as a free service, to raise the profile of their brand. And it probably would have been more successful without the increasingly desperate attempts to "monetise" it by stuffing your timeline with keyword-based advertising. Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneat…

And they would have given up control of the experience, and the types of discussion and interaction would have been different, and the "X and Y fought on twitter last night" would have become "X and Y fought on Zthingthatintegrates with twitter" instead.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#67

Post by jerf » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #34

rayalez wrote: post #24

Does anybody know why they have never tried to create a premium version? I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1] I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result. Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business…

> Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.

It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. OK, so the advertising rates go down... so what? Advertising rates are not what a business is trying to optimize, revenue is.

Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as it used to be now. How much money did Twitter leave on the table? It is, sure, possible that it would have been a net loss for them. But now I think a fresh look must be taken at the possibility that it would have been enough of a net gain to ensure their indepedence.

Plus one must consider the second-order effects of receiving subscription revenue. Might they have created a different and more valuable service to their customers and made even more as a result? Advertising-based businesses face the intrinsic paradox of trying to serve two customer bases at once who have somewhat opposed interests. (Even ignoring the socially corrosive influence of advertising incentivizing our smartest people to build the most powerful spying networks in history.) It is still not determined to my satisfaction that that is a stable business plan in the modern era.

One possible salutatory effect of Twitter's demise could be making the idea of subscriptions reasonable again. If even Twitter can't monetize entirely on advertising, who else can? Even Google and Facebook may be surprisingly fragile to a disruption in the advertising space, which is nominally not actually their business (even though of course it is). (The most likely disruption would be the continuing growth of ad-blocking software, but there's also the black swan possibilities as well.)

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#68

Post by mc32 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

proksoup wrote: post #38

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

It's where famous and infamous people go to boast and to brownnose each other and score points. It's a forum to continue high school style social interaction (peer pressure and peer approvals) Or, as nirvana said, territorial pissings.

It's also good as a breaking news medium.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#69

Post by rco8786 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #22

Why would anyone want to buy Twitter? Sure they have a great brand, loyal fans, but pretty much no way to monetizing them. It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

> but pretty much no way to monetizing them.

I don't understand why people keep saying this. Twitter has multiple billions of dollars in revenue from monetizing their users.

Profitable? No. They built out a massive organization planning for user growth comparable to how fast Facebook was growing, but user growth stalled. There is a profitable business within Twitter, but someone has to be willing to do the gut job.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#70

Post by untog » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #61

untog wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetisation usually implies end users paying for a product. I don't think Twitter will ever get to that point. But a media company like Disney (who, remember, own ESPN) could absolutely capitalise on the value of Twitter for live sports, for example. It would be valuable to them .

Couldn't they do that now... for free? What's the benefit to buying Twitter? If it's due to missing functionality they could probably just pay Twitter to implement the features they're missing and it would be cheaper than buying them outright, while providing a safety net in case it fails. Right now you're suggesting that e.g. Disney is buying Twitter, for 17 billion dollars, to implement an untested business case. T…

Being able to control the entire direction of a company is a lot more powerful than just paying them to add functionality. It also grants the ability to lock competitors out of the service once you've proved the new functionality is a success.

I don't think Twitter is worth $17bn, but we live in an era of excessively hyped up and unrealistic valuations, so I have no idea what the correct price actually is. Yes, buying Twitter is a gamble, but many acquisitions are.