Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 91 posts

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#81

Post by batiudrami »

grinich wrote: post #78
batiudrami wrote: post #72

The thing that I don't quite get with Twitter is that I genuinely do not know anyone in real life who actually uses it. Some people I know have accounts so they can use it as an aggregator, and the occasional person tweets a question at a pseudocelebrity who isn't otherwise accessible, but I do not know anyone who uses it for its intended purpose. For comparison, all my (24, m, Australia) friends use Facebook, most h…

Do you watch sports?

Yeah, I'm a season member of two sports - cricket and AFL.

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#82

Post by jussij »

yapcguy wrote: post #77
downandout wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock based compensation still costs investors money. They are effectively using investors' money to pay their employees, and that should and always will be priced into the stock. With its 18% decline in after hours trading today, Twitter's market cap is still $36.63 billion. Even if you analyze it based on the shell-game of adjusted EBITDA, and assume that it will stay at $45 million/quarter, you come out with a P/E…

> Stock based compensation still costs investors money. Hi, could you expand upon this, perhaps with an example? Thanks.

When the company floats they release a given amount of stock to the market.

If they then also release stock to pay their employees then the total stock in the market goes up.

If the total number of stock (i.e. shares) goes up but the company profits go and the money in the bank (and other assets) also goes down then the value of each of those individual stock items will also be going down.

Hence the drop in the share price.

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#83

Post by jpeg_hero »

rhizome wrote: post #36

I saw a provocative question on Twitter this afternoon: "What exactly does Twitter need 2300 employees for?"

Hoarding engineers.

Copy-cat to the old google strategy. Hire way, way too many engineers than your core business requires and maybe they'll figure something out.

Worked out good for goog, but I feel bad for engineering talent that goes to twitter.

Wake up! Yeah you'll get your proverbial "gold star" you've been chasing since kindergarten , but you are being warehoused and hoarded according to some mba's "strategic plan"

Come work for a small company and make something happen!

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#84

Post by corin_ »

lubujackson wrote: post #45
27182818284 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I think it is hard to justify twitter being worth 150x their quarterly revenue (~$36b valuation/~$240m What do you think is easy to justify for Twitter? (I'm actually pretty confident in Twitter, I guess. They took ten years-ish to IPO and not a day goes by where I don't see a hashtag on several products be it a local political group or a super bowl commercial)

It used to be AOL keywords. Times change quick.

I was going to make this point, but more than just "things can change" - AOL keywords didn't start getting massively used in adverts/etc. (in the UK at least) until pretty much when AOL were losing relevance, for search and most other things. Really, marketing trends shouldn't be used as a signal for much more than "marketing people like doing this"

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#85

Post by corin_ »

goblin89 wrote: post #80

> Twitter brings in money largely by selling advertising space and data on tweeting habits. It's the first time I hear about Twitter selling "tweeting habits" of their users. I don't know what that means, does anyone?

I don't know much about the specifics of what Twitter are selling, but there's two possibilities:

1. They're just selling raw feeds of data that people can pay for and analyse as they wish. This is something they definitely are doing, it's called the "Twitter Firehose", and isn't cheap to get access to.

2. They're selling their own, presumably anonymous, analysis of users for external advertising purposes. For example if I've tweeted about wanting to buy a car, maybe some car company's agency wants to buy data that will allow them to (re)target me outside of Twitter - I put (re) in brackets as it's the same concept as retargeting, but technically just targeting as I wouldn't (necessarily) have already visited that car seller's website. I've no idea if Twitter do anything like this, and I'm not entirely sure how it would work from a technical point of view, I've done marketing based around very targeted data, but only ever through companies that specialise on figuring out who to show adverts to, so I've never had to worry about how they were doing it.

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#86

Post by cordite »

steveplace wrote: post #24
capkutay wrote: post #20

I'm not of those people who thinks all tech valuations are insane, but I think it is hard to justify twitter being worth 150x their quarterly revenue (~$36b valuation/~$240m revenue). I understand twitter's valuation reflects the fact that it's a growing company, but even a company like facebook is only valued at 60x their quarterly revenue ($158b/$2.5b quarterly revenue). But at least the consensus on wall street an…

Growth investors don't invest off of current revenue or earnings. It's how they expect these numbers to grow in the next few quarters/years. So if you're going to be bearish on TWTR (which is fine) you probably want to go after their guidance or growth metrics. Their revenue growth is still growing, so you'd have to make the case that it will flatline sometime soon.

It seems like speculation is a game everyone wants to play. Until a bubble pops.

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#87

Post by 27182818284 »

lubujackson wrote: post #45
27182818284 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I think it is hard to justify twitter being worth 150x their quarterly revenue (~$36b valuation/~$240m What do you think is easy to justify for Twitter? (I'm actually pretty confident in Twitter, I guess. They took ten years-ish to IPO and not a day goes by where I don't see a hashtag on several products be it a local political group or a super bowl commercial)

It used to be AOL keywords. Times change quick.

>It used to be AOL keywords. Times change quick.

Interesting idea. I was around for AOL keywords, they weren't the same nor were they used the same way by as many different types of people. AOL has a billion dollar market cap still, despite the times changing quickly. Does it mean Twitter will be around 100 years from now? Of course that's unlikely. (Isn't GE the only one left from the original US stock exchanges?) But I think Twitter has a solid shot for the next several years. #TwitterCouldLose80PercentOfItsUsersAndStillBeLargerThanAOLAtItsPeak

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#88

Post by ivv »

corin_ wrote: post #85
goblin89 wrote: post #80

> Twitter brings in money largely by selling advertising space and data on tweeting habits. It's the first time I hear about Twitter selling "tweeting habits" of their users. I don't know what that means, does anyone?

I don't know much about the specifics of what Twitter are selling, but there's two possibilities: 1. They're just selling raw feeds of data that people can pay for and analyse as they wish. This is something they definitely are doing, it's called the "Twitter Firehose", and isn't cheap to get access to. 2. They're selling their own, presumably anonymous, analysis of users for external advertising purposes. For exampl…

An ad deal with Twitter comes with an analytics dashboard and an ability to run surveys on users targeted across various dimensions.

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#89

Post by ionwake »

rcoder wrote: post #58
samsolomon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this before, but if Twitter added a tier of paid accounts that offered analytics, scheduling and other features, I'd upgrade. Maybe there would be enough revenue to keep the servers running.

Full disclosure: I used to work at Twitter, and this conversation came up all the time. I even proposed it myself as a naive new hire, and after a few good-humored suggestions from coworkers to run the math, ended up with roughly the following scenario: Say 1% of Twitter's active users would be willing to pay for such a service. (That's extremely generous, I think, but it makes the math easier.) At 240 million MAUs,…

So how do they make most of their money?

Re: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

#90

Post by Grue3 »

Greenisus wrote: post #41
zaidf wrote: post #39

Has a social network at twitter's scale ever been able to undo a growth plateau? In this business you live and die by organic growth. I have so many problems with the twitter product I don't even know where to begin. I am working on writing my own UI to twitter to look more like facebook. At its essence, I long for a twitter that: * makes it easier to follow and indulge in conversations(facebook does this) * filters…

If you want Twitter to be more like Facebook, why not just use Facebook? I agree that I'd like for it to be easier to dive into a conversation. It's a lot better than it was years ago, but I still struggle with the UI for that sometimes. As for the 140 char limit, I think that should never change. Removing that would remove the entire essence of Twitter and turn it into endless drivel.

> Removing that would remove the entire essence of Twitter and turn it into endless drivel.

Funny, because that's exactly what it is right now. When was the last time there was something worth reading on Twitter?

Post reply on HN