That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not necessarily something anyone would want to pay a lot of money for. How would anyone monetize it? Twitter can't really control how many non-users see a tweet.
Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit
Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base
Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet.
People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost.
If this weeds out 80% of the shit while keeping 80% of the good stuff, Twitter will simultaneously shrink their costs while growing revenues to become a sustainable business.
With this model, Twitter is a $1 billion per year profitable business [2] with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. [3]
Improve the signal-to-noise ratio and Twitter becomes THE place to be for all kinds of communities. That means a return to growth and higher rates per 1000 tweets.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
[2] Start with 200 billion tweets per year. 90% are shit, and 80% of these go away, leaving 36 billion shitty tweets. 10% are good, and 80% of these stay, leaving 16 billion good tweets. 52 billion tweets in total, monetized at $20 per thousand is a billion bucks a year.
[3] Signal-to-noise ratio before is 1:9, after it's 1:2.
Is it? I always assumed all their money was plowed into moonshot development to try to find something, ANYTHING to make a billion dollar company (stuff they throw away within 12 months, like Twitter #Music)
Just supporting their core functionality could be done with a fraction of the workforce, and could probably be profitable (although it would never satisfy the investor valuation)
You could add a "tip jar" to allow followers to support someone by buying Tweets for them, so that high-signal accounts would seldom have to pay that fee.
If you disagree and feel strong enough about it to do that, post a comment like nowprovision did.
I'm only slightly not serious about this :-)
If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...
I wonder if they're also messing with the lists... In any case, as far as I can tell, I seem to be getting all the tweets of people in the list in chronological order.
Twitter has been trying to reign that in since (various things their official client can do is not accessible via the public APIs), but they can't just drop their third party support or they would see the usage rates dwindle in no time flat.
Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.
Twitter is in between anonymous forums (unfortunately they all died) and FB/LinkedIn in terms of ability of advertisers to target users. They're living off of high impressions, and they've basically already saturated the market. Now they need to somehow raise ad value, which would mean integrating hundreds of free, quality services to gather data like Google or tying Twitter accounts to real identities (like the Google+ attempt)
Yet Twitter has people like Kim Kardashian selling tweets for $200K/tweet[1] (so there's your measurement of ad-value), and yet Twitter can't make money.
Meanwhile, people are moving to Snapchat stories which is exactly the product Twitter should have built. Twitter, on the other-hand make the ground breaking decision to not include URLs in the 140 char tweet count.
Twitter can't ship new product.
[1] http://haveuheard.net/2015/08/kim-kardashian-how-much-money-...
I marked it as offensive ;)
Just because something costs money doesn't mean it's valuable. Being at the center of the zeitgeist definitely seems like it would be profitable, but de facto it hasn't been for 10 years, so it probably just isn't.
Being in the center of the zeitgeist isn't a substitute for making a profit.
Facebook seems to have a reputation of being more ubiquitous, yet creepier than Twitter.
(None of which inherently makes it profitable.)