"Sell ads" seems to be most places' "Step 3," though I don't know how well it's gone for Twitter.

If you're operating at that scale, I think "become a full-on advertising and ad tech company, platform, service, and network from top to bottom" seems like the only viable "step 3" (as with Google and Facebook).

I don't think just selling ads is sufficient; especially if it's not a service you can operate at a relatively low cost with a skeleton crew. I think it's probably either that or start charging for something. (Unless your goal isn't to ever make a profit, I suppose.)

Discord seemed to make it work (I think?) by combining an initial semi-skeleton crew approach with a freemium charging approach. They tried a few other things, but I think those efforts flopped.

Yeah by "sell ads" here I mean "do the whole data collection, targeting, whatever" deal that the platforms do.

Discord... definitely different. It's hard for me to believe that Nitro really can be paying for Discord but I guess it's possible?

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> Forbes estimated 1 million people are using Nitro as of 2020, and they made $130 million in revenue in 2020. If you assume that's all the $10/month Nitro (not the cheaper Nitro Classic), then 1 million users paying for Nitro would only account for a pretty small percentage of that. If the Nitro users estimate is accurate, not sure where the rest comes from.

1 million users * $10/month/user * 12 months/year = $120 million/year

That is close to the cited $130m annual revenue.

Yeah that's my bad, I mistakenly forgot to multiply it monthly for a moment.

Twitter ads have not returned strong ROI for us (direct response for politics). And dubious for persuasion (more similar to traditional commercial brand ads) though I don't have much hard survey evidence just comparative engagement stats.

I don't know if it's primarily the format, or the different type of user compared to FB, but FB is the winner hands down.

As evidenced by the struggle with StackOverflow too, who sits atop a trove of content

The StackOverflow thing is a bit weird, because what the owners have and consider valuable is "a place where people feel comfortable coming and asking questions", but what the core community values is "high-quality curated content", and they're very willing to do aggressive gatekeeping, thus conflicting with value 1, to preserve value 2.

High-quality curated content has been SO's goal since day one. The question/answer format is a means to this end. That's why it has come that most people can easily find a solution to their problem. https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376

>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood

Yeah, this is the kicker. I think SO's primary intended audience is people clicking Google search results.

If I'm Googling something technical and I see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange results, I always click those first, because I know I'm almost always going to attain the most helpful-information-per-unit-time that way. Even if an answer's many years old, it's usually going to be more helpful than most of the much more recent links, which are often just cookie cutter blogspam.

>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood

But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.

I was following StackOverflow back when it was being planned on a podcast. "High-quality curated content" was very much the original mission. This was the driving factor behind the wiki-like interface. In fact, if anything, I'd argue that the problem is that this didn't take off as much as was hoped.

Yeah but now StackOverflow we pay for it in my company. Their value is in the whole info sharing model of the tool, the public one becomes more useless as you grow and the private one is invaluable to ask crazy questions about ultra specific internal idiocy people lost the source code of.

I only go to the public one a few times a day now, compared to being wired to it as a beginner :D

I'm jealous. My company bought it and made a huge internal adoption effort, but it never really amounted to anything and is now pretty much dead.

StackOverflow should be cheap to operate and the value comes almost exclusively from the community. So I don't see any good reason why StackOverflow would need to earn much revenue. Probably an annual fundraiser like what Wikipedia does would be more than sufficient to cover the operating expenses.

And their stock shows that. Especially when compared to other big tech companies that started at about the same time.

Somehow Google and Facebook figured it out. Why couldn't Twitter?

The both figured it out with incredibly invasive tracking and profiling. I don’t know why this move is being seen as a slight to the company.

I don't have any problem with Twitter adding a paid option. I've never even used Twitter nor will I ever so it so anything they do to the platform doesn't affect me. It just seems weird that people are making the claim that you can't monitize a large unpaid user-base.

You can, but you basically have to masquerade your company as a user-facing service while behind the scenes it's almost entirely just an ad and ad tech platform.

I think it's plausible Jack Dorsey maybe genuinely just didn't want to sign that deal with the devil. I know I wouldn't want to if I made Twitter. (I have no idea if that's what happened, of course. Maybe he wanted to but couldn't find a good way to achieve it.)

Well I have faith the MBAs will eventually take over and then monetize away.