Actually, that makes total sense. There are multiple VPs at engineering firms. People always complain about how big Twitter is, how they can't believe how many employees Twitter has, but people don't realize Twitter has two "users": actual "users," and advertisers. Twitter has to dedicate a huge number of engineers, product managers, marketers, account managers, etc. to dealing with advertisers, setting up the ad auctions, analytics, dashboards, etc.

Yes, but speaking as someone who has used Google's great advertising tools as well as mailed a money order to a niche forum owner to run an ad, the advertisers will put up with anything if you can deliver converting users.

Yes. But when 1% optimization means millions in revenue, you're going to throw a lot of engineers at the problem.

good point

I'd still suggest that, even though twitter obviously needs advertisers, someone with a deep understanding of users and how they use twitter would lead to more user growth / more engaged users. Which is probably the thing twitter needs most.

Maybe. But at the same time, Twitter has a lot of influential and/or affluent users, which a lot of companies would like to reach.

Maybe they shouldn't try to grow absolute user numbers and instead focus on being a publishing platform for influencers (keep in mind that lots of people who aren't Twitter users see popular tweets on other platforms). Then they could focus on providing great advertising and targeting for companies that want to reach influencers.

At the end of the day Twitter's customers are advertisers. It seems like they are trying to sell these customers a way to reach a mass market audience. Maybe they should play to their unique advantage and focus on selling influencers' and/or business decision-makers' attention.

Twitter offers those products already - it offers promoted trends, custom emojis, and custom moments to a small pool of 'Premium' advertisers at $100-250k a pop.

It's a good way to control the quality of output, but it isn't a good way to make mega millions, as these big companies and influencers only have so much advertising budget to go round.

Consider also for someone like Trump or a Kardashian, the ability to reach 17.6M followers (and however many more through retweets + national news) for free with no filtering is a huge draw. It's hard to get them to pay for what they have already. Start to introduce features (as Facebook did) that make it more difficult for people to see tweets, and both the end consumers and the influencers themselves will revolt.

Focus less on absolute user numbers and the quality of the product declines (you have less data to train your targeting algorithms on), and the site as a whole becomes less of a draw for influencers too.

Not saying T shouldn't offer 'Premium' content to media companies, but going all in on large advertisers seems like a route to the poorhouse.

They already have more than enough users. Twitter needs more/better advertizers if they want to break even. Users can be got through sponsorships and celeb endorsements, paying advertizers require competative platforms.

He was not the VP of product, he was a VP of product, specifically VP of product for Twitter's advertising arm.

Because it's not a social network? It's an advertising brokerage.

nope, thats their monetization strategy not their identity. a subtle difference.

Ok but the point is that it's not crazy to have a VP of product for the parts of the product that deliver the monetization strategy.

yes i would agree on that

Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?

Didn't Facebook recently get called a "free content ad network"?

I think that term describes most of those companies well, as it incorporates their business model. They just vary in what kind of content or service they offer with their ads.

I dont think it's unfair to call a business what it is -- just like we do with farms or investment firms, though they greatly differ in how they go about that business model.

And they all have engineering teams dedicated to their ad technologies? With VP level leadership or higher?

Why are we making everything a question?

I'm keeping in theme with the parent comment? I'm glad you agree it's retarded?

And users aren't important, just their eye balls.

Financial Times and Spotify make money on subscriptions.

Actually Spotify lost $194m last year on subscriptions.

Maybe, because building an adtech company is not something he wants to be remembered for?