The attention economy seems to be "forcing" people to jump to conclusions as fast as possible to write that viral post "X is dead", "goodbye Y", etc.
You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business. Even in its heyday, it had a fraction of the ad revenue of Meta. They were just showing users less relevant ads, meaning less value to advertisers and less revenue generated.
You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.
I half suspect the only reason Twitter had the status it did is because all the news organizations pushed it so hard. Hell, it did all the hard work of finding interesting "new/hot" topics for them to cover. Made their job easier, and it's with the journalists I see a lot of concern and fear over where Twitter is heading.
Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.
Twitter had a team dedicated to working with news organisations to surface their content throughout the app. The leader of that team quit yesterday.
People seem to think Twitter is this almighty power that everyone was begging to work with but actually it's the opposite. Twitter was out there hustling for any relationship they could get.
As advertisers are saying, what Twitter really had going for it wasn't that it was a great place to advertise so much as it was a very engaged ad sales team that leveraged their agency and advertiser relations for all they were worth. Gutting ad sales (and mocking the concept of brand safety) is Musk -- whether he realizes it or not -- burning the advertising bridges behind him and forcing him to commit entirely to this idea of Twitter being a subscription-funded service. Now, Riedy's a long-timer who's held senior positions in both US and EMEA ad sales, so there's what normally would be considered a steady hand at the tiller, but not clear to me if he can keep the ship afloat under such a mercurial owner.
Discord is the closest thing to a successful subscription only social media business. Compare what Nitro offers to Twitter Blue.
Twitter Blue is like buying the “I am rich” app while Discord Nitro solves actual customer pain points.
Discord has about 10% of their active users paying for Nitro by my calculation based on available information. Twitter getting anywhere close to that level is not likely. Discord has been building their service around paid features for years.
Luckily, Twitter has a large and skilled engineering team capable of quickly rolling out valuable new features to entirely change their business model!
(Sidenote: has anyone ever heard of a generally stable ~10 year IPOed tech company pivoting so drastically? It’s insane)
When on vacation earlier this year I saw ads in a language I don't understand.
Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.
This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon
When I went on a vacation to another country, I saw an ad for an ISP in the tri-state area 10 times. Friends, I have never been to the tri-state area in my life. I don't live in the US. I have no idea why I saw this.
This is a mobile app! You can get a coarse location, good enough to not show me an ad meant for an area 12000 km away. And yet, Twitter could not manage it.
That ISP wasted money by advertising on Twitter. Eventually other brands will realise this as well.
>They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives.
The RoI will be better than alternatives if Twitter ads are cheap enough. TikTok and possibly YouTube aren't profitable either, but they have inherently higher expenses. If Facebook and Instagram can be profitable, that means that there's a profitable company inside Twitter somewhere. I'm skeptical that Elon can achieve this, but that doesn'tean it's impossible.
>This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business.
Twitter had >5 billion in ad revenue. Facebook isnt the minimum threshold for good revenue.
It isn't a winner take all system. Meta might get the lions share, but that doesnt mean there is no room for competition.
Costs are adjusted to get similar ROI. Meta might get more clickthrough per add and command a higher price, but Twitter can compete with more adds for the same price, resulting in the same ROI.
Not if they can’t prove the ROI vs other ad channels. They will just move spend from Twitter to better performing platforms, or even into other marketing or sales activities entirely. For most brands, Twitter isn’t the sole place they can target their audience.
As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.
They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.
Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.
No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…
On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.
Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.
You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.
I mentioned in another reply, but none of the networks you enumerate have the same value proposition as Twitter.
For example today, I'm watching the World Cup.. Argentina just conceded a goal... I want to see reactions, memes, etc. Too soon for Youtube, uploading videos takes time, TikTok is too random.. Too soon for Tumblr and Pinterest.. Snap format is weird.. Reddit also might have something but I want a shorter format, reactions from known celebrities and sport commentators.. Instagram has some stuff but it is too picture centered... and then comes Twitter, exactly what I wanted, a quick fix of the now, some funny replies, I scroll a little bit, I go back to watching the match.
In the real world people are using Twitter the same as they were before Musk, and if the this trend doesn't change or even improves, advertisers will come back.
If there are eyeballs there are ads. It's a fact of nature (sadly).
Please tell me something that millions of people pay attention to daily that isn't plagued with ads.
Twitter was always the 'commercial break' of the internet. Ad spots on TV and radio were 15-30 seconds. On twitter you got 140 (now 280 characters). Its always been advertising. Sizzle clips, strong sentences with no meat. Why would you pay for advertising on a website whose entire purpose is advertising. Maybe their ad targeting is not strong. The risk now is you're supporting someone promoting hate, violence, lies..... Maybe someone is still there that honestly likes twitter and doesnt like exposure. But its always been the internet's commercial break.
There are so many competitors for Twitter. Every social media platform is an alternative. Twitter's only moat is the network effect, and they are ruining any chance of that being maintained by making the experience awful, not moderating the platform and reinventing people who the majority of users don't want to hear from.
Snapchat, TikTok, Hacker News, and LinkedIn are all social media sites. In the sense that you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, sure, these are competitors to Twitter.
But as far as actual content, value, or user experience, none of these are direct competitors. How exactly would the White House or your local school district go about making an announcement on TikTok?
It seems like the content, user experience, and value to the user are not necessarily relevant to the customer, who is the advertiser.
In that sense, I think all the other major social media platforms are direct competitors to Twitter, probably better ones at that considering how often Twitter content is shared around as screenshots and quotes instead of funneling users into data-collecting apps.
The advertisers just want to get their message in front of someone who is paying attention and fits their desired attributes.
At least for me personally there aren't any real alternatives.
* Facebook/Meta: I'm a life long non-facebook user and never will use any facebook product.
* Reddit: I'm on Reddit and have been for a long time but moderators ban people on a whim constantly for the slightest disagreement. My primary account has been banned from several major subreddits for a long time. Any community that grows to any size becomes a cess pool. It also doesn't work for news, as news is delayed by up to a day before getting any kind of traction.
* Mastodon: Becoming a left wing echo chamber that mixes the worst parts of Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter.
* Truth Social: Don't get me started...
* Forums: I still use a number of site-dedicated forums.
How does that different user experience and format affect the customer? By customer, I mean advertiser.
Why does an advertiser go to Twitter over Meta or TikTok? That’s the real question to be asking.
I’d make the argument that the content format is very nearly irrelevant to the advertisers.
I can understand why an advertiser goes to Twitter instead of more defined niche ad platforms like Yelp, Google Maps, and iOS App Store.
What customer can be reached on Twitter that can’t be reached in Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? In my mind, if advertisers are spooked by Twitter, they’ve got plenty of equivalent alternatives.
What’s to stop any of its current competitors from making a Twitter clone, one with moderation? If he can’t keep advertisers, Google or someone else could leverage their already existing network effects to take Twitter refugees.
> Google or someone else could leverage their already existing network effects
Google tried this taking on Facebook. It didn't work because network effects cannot force someone to a new network. Heck, it almost killed YouTube in the process of getting Google+ their network.
A lot of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. There are many people who don’t want the “new” twitter to succeed and being vocal about it will result in advertisers leaving the platform making the whole thing collapse in on itself.
Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
> Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
Wow. That’s a pretty mean-spirited way to go through life. Why not put your efforts into building something positive instead of trying to tear others down?
The problem with that goal, even if one were to assume your assessment of him is correct, is that you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever, thus increasing our existential risks.
Since his success metric for launching Tesla was the success of green tech itself rather than Tesla's market share and his goals for SpaceX were similarly broad rather than purely financial, making a point of trying to make him fail is also negatively aligned with long term civilizational outcomes.
It would take a very petty person to hope that we go back to throwing away rockets after a single use, just because they have a beef with the person in and inspired others to build a reusable one.
If you feel that the 2018-2021 era version of Twitter was its ideal state, that's defensible even if a bit odd. But hoping a platform millions love fails, just because of the guy who bought it (and has a track record of doing great things for humanity), then your goal sucks.
It’s pretty bizarre take to think that just because Elon has done amazing things for humanity (which I’ll take at face value), that you should root for him to succeed at whatever he does, regardless of how destructive it is.
I hope he fails hard at this and returns to making rockets. Tesla could disappear at this point and I don’t think it would matter, but SpaceX feels important still.
Well hopefully you're not implying that's my take, because I don't think you should root for him to succeed at everything he does.
I think you should focus on what you want to make in the world rather than how to hurt others.
Even within the scope of companies to destroy, Twitter seems like an exceptionally poor target. Is Twitter really so much more threatening than Apple, Google, MS, FB, Tiktok, Tencent, any company marketing cigarettes etc, that it's worthy of setting aside all the productive things you can do with your life and make it your ambition to bring it down?
The amount of negative energy focused at it is downright pathological given its size and impacts, IMO.
“The problem with that goal…is that you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever”
I don’t care about Twitter itself, but I hope that Elon’s cruel and destructive approach fails.
And I’m not so entranced by his self-aggrandizing mythology that I think him failing at Twitter will have any impact whatsoever on adoption of electric vehicles or our ability to get to space. Give me a break lol
> ”I don’t care about Twitter itself, but I hope that Elon’s cruel and destructive approach fails.”
Cruel and destructive?
That’s quite the extreme and bizarre interpretation of recent events, and it’s not very charitable. I hope you find something a bit more positive to focus your energies on.
The truth is, neither of us can know what the long term consequences of the leadership change will be but it’s almost certainly not worth doing this to yourself over it.
> you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever thus increasing our existential risks.
Even if you thought that we could become multi-planetary (incl. not just getting to other planets but living there in our current human form), thinking that Elon Musk is the only person on earth ever who could make this happen is pretty cultish. I mean, come on. Do you really believe he is humanity's savior?
Also, you completely missed the point. Since his ultimate goal with SpaceX is a multi-planetary future, the only way to make him “fail” at that goal is to ensure a single or zero-planetary future for humanity.
Now you are redefining what failure looks like. I'd bet most people that don't want 'Elon the bully' to succeed are talking about their businesses failing (e.g Twitter going down). If you're somehow claiming Musk's succeeds even if SpaceX fails as a business but another company from another founder succeeds in making a multi-planetary future, that's quite the mental gymnastics, but, whatever lets you keep the saviour image of Musk you have I suppose.
Thanks for the nudge on the guidelines, you're right.
You are however redefining the meaning in this conversation or just not really aware that no one here wants that 'mission' to fail, we want Elon's methods to fail because they set a bad precedent for current and future leaders.
It's only in your opinion that is what he is. If you've actually been following him in detail for any length of time you'd realize that doesn't really describe him.
“Pedo guy”: bully, even ignoring the borderline abusive behavior over the last few weeks.
Narcissist? The fact that he’s nominally head of 3 companies, trying to execute a dramatic turnaround on one in real time, but still tweets constantly.
Certainly, he has many positive attributes. But, quoting Steve Rogers, I don’t like bullies.
The Pedo guy was one of the dumbest things Elon has done. But it's worth noting that the guy had used a sexually explicit insult against Elon on TV immediately before that. It didn't come out of nowhere.
Elon stupidly went much further. Elon is mean to people who are mean to him and nice to people who are nice to him. That makes him kind of easy to manipulate.
Neurotypicals (and those with higher social intelligence) know you're supposed to pretend to be nice to people who are mean to you.
I guess you can find excuses to defend anyone, including bullies. I mean, most bullies were bullied and abused themselves, so there's that. What's the excuse for the other points raised by the OP though? + a bunch of other stuff such as firing people and announcing it on Twitter over people disagreeing on Twitter with him?
I find amusing all the mental gymnastics Musk followers are doing these days. It does seem like a personality cult.
I used to look up to him, read one of his biographies, etc; Plenty to admire from his achievements, but his most recent toxic behaviour and shitty management style has really changed that.
The problem is that this is a unique case. If Twitter 2.0 succeeds, then it sends a signal to the capital class that they can proceed in buying up tech companies and gutting them to the bone. The power that Engineers have will be severely reduced and I suspect that avenue towards a respectable middle class life will be further eroded. Hell if Twitter only lasts a few more years, Elon has the potential of turning it around enough to sell it, getting the credit and the profit and letting someone else hold the bag. In this case its not a matter of mean spirited or not. This is a silent war going on and the other side could care less about being nice.
To be honest, I think maybe engineers' talents would be better spent on things other than optimizing ad placement and toxic engagement. So I'm fine either way...
If Twitter 2.0 succeeds, then ad-reliant "tech" businesses will be gutted and engineers freed to do more constructive things... if it fails, then one of the most toxic websites--toxic even before Elon, of course--might go under. But I think that's wishful thinking.
I think it wont stop at ad-reliant tech companies. Twitter 2.0 succeeding will show that you can force Engineers to work in much harsher conditions for less pay and that will become the norm. They become the same as other blue collar roles. Just surviving and not thriving. I've often felt that was a motivating push behind "Learn to Code", bootcamps and other initiatives. Engineers have been blessed to have this unique power over the capital class. Its a once in a generation (or two) opportunity and that class is trying to find any way it can to wrestle back that power.
His agenda and what he’s enabling is incredibly mean spirited to large swaths of the population to the point where it observably increases violence against them. In contrast, my hope that his financial venture fails isn’t all that destructive.
I find it difficult to believe that "embracing the idea that what is legal should be legal on a platform designed for conveying speech" should be considered evil. Unless you believe that American law with regards to speech is also evil.
What's remarkable to me is people cheering desperately for Tesla to fail.
Also weird that people were both cheering for Elon to be forced to buy Twitter, then mad that he bought it.
Then cheering for Elon Twitter to fail (hoping for advertisers to leave even before any layoffs were announced) and then lambasting Elon for being so mean to lay off people (how can they stay employed if Twitter's revenue fails?). It's really weird.
You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.