> advertisers reduce their spend on FB because of poor results

The problem I see is that FaceBook's news feed is a driver of traffic to other websites, as people click those links, whereas Twitter doesn't seem to drive much traffic. I know sites that get 40% of their traffic from m.facebook, and another 30% from www.facebook.com month in, month out. I don't know many (if any?) sites where Twitter is ONE OF the major source of traffic, let alone THE major source of traffic.

That makes Twitter's product far less advertiser useful than even companies like Outbrain and Taboola.

I just think the way things have panned out, it is a source of interesting comments, but not really a place to find interesting stuff. Both FaceBook and Google are the roads that lead to destinations, whereas Twitter is the destination. Sadly, for an advertising play, being the road is more profitable.

In the long run, I don't think that Twitter's problem is one of competition from FB or any other competitor. They have enough users that they could turn a profit even if they could monetize those users, regardless of competition. But they haven't turned a profit, which after 10 years is a strong indicator that they can't turn a profit.

If Twitter is able to time an addition of ads with a major event that damages FB's user base, the influx of users from FB might cancel out the loss of users from the addition of ads, and Twitter might be able to turn a profit. But that effect is a) temporary, and b) fairly unlikely. Even if they managed to eat into their competitors' user bases, they have failed to monetize their existing hundreds of millions of users, so there's no reason to believe they'd be able to monetize future hypothetical users.

Whenever people discuss Twitter's finances I wonder what they'd look like if there was a paid tier. Just a few bucks a year to mark your account as Supportin' Twitter. Without necessarily having any other perks. Except maybe "not having any fucking ads". I'd probably do it; I was a paid user of Livejournal for many years when it was Where All My Friends Were.

But no. It's always "monetize by becoming another goddamn channel to advertise to people through".

I agree with the "not have any ads which follow you around the internet" as an appeal for the more privacy conscious folks which is probably an idea which is going to get more traction in the coming days...

Even better, actively mock Facebook/Google's privacy track record (while peddling the paid Twitter accounts) like the way Apple did to Microsoft. If you are going down anyway, why not go out with a resounding bang? :-) But you will burn all your bridges. Very few folks have the kind of chutzpah that Steve Jobs had.

> They have enough users that they could turn a profit even if they could monetize those users, regardless of competition.

That's an excellent point. I started this discussion wondering "Is the company in such bad shape that it needs to find a buyer?" and I think you might have just convinced me that it needs at least some kind of joint venture , if not be bought outright.

Hope Twitter doesn't go the way of MySpace.

> But they haven't turned a profit, which after 10 years is a strong indicator that they can't turn a profit.

In those 10 years Twitter has changed leaderships multiple times. Twitter has never had stable and competent management.

That's symptomatic of the problem, not causal. Despite leadership changes, Twitter has build a solid infrastructure, raised money, etc.--all the things that would make them a profit if their business model were at all profitable. Leadership keeps changing because nobody knows how to make it profitable, and we've tried enough approaches now that I think we can conclude it won't be profitable.