I would suggest that Twitter is a niche. It is in a brand management and customer engagement niche, and without some giant platform change, I think that trying to profit by increasing the number of eyeballs is always going to be challenging to the bottom line if the business value does not dramatically increase. The noise in twitters ecosystem from all those users, while interesting and good for research data sets, will eventually be a counter business/profit feature. The value proposition for users, in my mind, has been access and audience, but the value should have been focused on authoritative sourcing and customer recovery/engagement as soon as they took outside investment.

Not disagreeing or anything your comment just brought this to mind.

Twitter a billion dollar company, a social network used by presidential candidates and tens of millions of people is a niche?? Do you understand the dictionary meaning of the term "niche" if anything Twitter is opposite of it.

The entirety of Twitter is a subset of one feature of Facebook - that's why its referred to as niche.

features don't make it niche, user base does and twitters user base is anything but niche, it's potentially the connected whole world.

Niche: the situation in which a business's products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular kind or group of people

or a specialized market

Size is not necessarily a function of the word niche it only implies that the good or service being sold targets a group that is not a majority of all of the market participants. In twitters case 3.4B users on the internet, with only some subgroup that participates on social media and then only a subgroup of that group that wishes to participate with limited post length and then, business wise, just the business niche that have a large customer base within that subgroup of internet/social media/short form.

As an example BMW is a niche business, luxury auto, that had 92B in revenue last year.

totally agree. Twitter may have a limited set of features which may make it seem "niche", but it's market is basically everyone.

Twitter's niche is media types, for sure.

Twitter is a niche in my humble opinion. They are basically a short messaging pubsub service for humans, and even artificially limited themselves to that niche, by not increasing message size limits in any obvious way, by not implementing other "social" features people actually use like better photo sharing, galleries and gallery sharing, games, etc. They didn't try to become a full-fledged social network and thus competitor to Facebook (and what Google+ was supposed to be) with messaging and a ton of other stuff.

Even that One Big New Thing they announced, namely Moments, still operated exclusively in that short messaging pubsub niche entirely (and turned out not to be something their users cared about that much so far).

Now their niche market seems kind of saturated, user numbers mostly peaked, and Facebook also started competing even more in that niche when they introduced searchable #hashtags and ways to follow accounts without becoming mutual friends, while still offering their other core features and "external" services like instagram (in direct competition to twitter) or whatsapp (in direct competition to twitter DMs). Tumblr is still there, which to me always felt mostly like a "twitter" for longer-form messages. I saw people switch from twitter to Slack (and recently Discord) and embrace their not-globally-visible pubsub models in some cases, so there is some competition there too.

So in conclusion: twitter seems to me like a pretty niche service (albeit large niche), and has competitors left and right now. It isn't in "that" niche, but in a niche.

I was just responding to the parent post who suggested that you can’t bootstrap because some better funded company will come along and put you out of business. You can if you choose the right niche.

Of course Twitter as a business did not have this choice - they had to go big or go home. For the founders though it might have been better to have built something else.

> For the founders though it might have been better to have built something else.

I doubt it. All of the founders are mega wealthy now both as a result of Twitter and other ventures. Twitter might not have reached the dizzy heights they aspired to, but like it or loathe it Twitter is a household name and the founders are "famous".