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Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

wsj.com

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Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#81

Post by oldmanjay »

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.

I'm endlessly amused by the attitude people get over websites they like. I'm not sure what your personal argument for forcing twitter to be a utility is, but I'm sure it would make me laugh. Care to let me know?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#82

Post by kayoone »

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.

But isn't the idea that you will make more money from the business accounts as opposed to ads ?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#83

Post by ng12 »

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…

I wonder if Twitter missed out by not being Patreon. There's a proven business model of paying content creators directly and they already had one of the platform for content creators to communicate with fans.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#84

Post by this_user »

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?

I am not sure I would call what happens on Twitter discussions. It's a great platform for posting things that are easily misunderstood or taken out of context due to their brevity. Then someone starts a witch-hunt, which in turn sparks a counter-witch-hunt. In the end no one is any wiser, but everyone is little more bitter.

I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the service. But in reality most of the content is just meaningless noise. It's hard to find any signal on that platform.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#85

Post by imagist »

Good on them--it's a wise choice to get out before the bubble pops.

I've said before[1] that Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble and that people's opinion of Twitter is a good litmus test for people's understanding of the industry. It sounds like Twitter's management understands their position and is looking to get out while there are still people who think Twitter has value.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12564298

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#86

Post by tarancato »

Semi-offtopic: this is what the front page of Twitter looks like for me.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s5LeMVvmcJ0/V_UeJYgxG6I/A...

There's this and two more tweets, in rotation. They are three sports-related Tweets from two years ago, with that shit image quality, and what's even more amusing: since I'm based in Spain, they believe I'm interested in Argentinian football, probably because I speak the same language (but Spaniards usually know absolutely nothing about sports from South America, neither are they interested in that).

Even better, the cookie use banner moves the tweet down, making it overlap with the footer.

And this has been like this for two years already. I guess nobody ever logs in in the company?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#87

Post by madshiva »

jacquesm wrote: post #60
madshiva wrote: post #43

Why share things that are not freely available on Internet? I don't want to subscribe to read more...

Ironically, Twitter is up for sale because there are things freely available on the Internet.

Internet was a way to share information, things, it was never for money. Money destroy everything. Human Rights Council have stated "to condemn the restrictions on access to information on the Internet" (A/HRC/32/L.20)

http://thehill.com/sites/default/files/a_hrc_32_l.20_english...

It's all about ethic and control of the source. If you can check the source, you can't tell if it's true or not and also access to information should not be limited by your money.

This make me sad the way Internet is turning to.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#88

Post by jondubois »

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…

It's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself.

I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#89

Post by mrweasel »

inverse_pi wrote: post #64
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.

Fair enough, they have some small way of monetizing, which is 400 - 500 million USD short of covering their operating cost.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#90

Post by fredguth »

lhnz wrote: post #16

Kind of insane that they've reached this point. Why didn't they attempt to monetise journalism by providing users of Twitter with a subscription that allows them to skip the paywalls of big newspapers and that could automatically aggregate the individual micropayments into a revenue stream for the publishers that sign up? (This would make sense to me: often an individual interaction is worth very little, but the aggr…

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