Twitter has been giving away more and more ground to Facebook. Facebook groups are not even suited for a lot of things that they have become and twitter should have been there. Twitter needs to look at what the use cases are:
- Customer Support, twitter is customer support for a lot of companies and being public makes grievance redressal possible. They just need to get better tools and charge companies for being their support interface. The companies may not have choices.
- Events. Twitter is the heart of events. Create tools to manage public events and charge for them. Give something to the organizers and take money for it.
- Pages. Give an alternative business model to facebook. Its too big to fight right now. Give a paid version of facebook pages with a promise of not losing organic growth. Brands spent a lot on getting tons of likes that are not useful any more. Followers are still somewhat valuable. Make pages interesting for brands (give them something to justify the payment).
- Advertising is not always the solution. Customize for the key use cases.
- Open up. Facebook is the AOL of social. Someone needs to step up and be as open as the internet. Aren't you suffocating behind the closed doors? Did you really have a reason for closing them?
I would pay for a TweetDeck subscription. They have consistently acquired products and have ignored them. It is a shame they don't invest more resources on TweetDeck. I am just an end user and I find TweetDeck to be one of the only sane ways to use Twitter. I simply cannot imagine how beneficial TweetDeck would be as a tool for someone who does marketing/handles brands.
A recommended tweets/articles tab a la Pocket's recommendations feed would also bring in a lot of customers for their promoted tweets. The problem isn't ads/sponsored tweets, its how poorly Twitter chooses to present them.
The customer support tools is a great idea. Twitter should optimize for how their users are actually using Twitter.
Other ideas:
- "Enterprise Twitter" for private communications and sharing status updates. Something like Yammer or Facebook at Work or even Slack, though big companies might not want a consumer brand associated with "goofing off" inside their enterprise.
- Flattr-like micropayments to let people "tip" a favorite tweet. This could encourage more people to tweet as a source of income. Like PayPal, Twitter could generate interest off people's tip accounts.
Customer Support, twitter is customer support for a lot of companies and being public makes grievance redressal possible. They just need to get better tools and charge companies for being their support interface. The companies may not have choices.
Twitter support is common in CRM already. The company I work for has it in our products and AFAIK so do many others in the space.
Totally agree. But many/most of the proposed solutions typically involve charging the users for basic usage which is completely stupid for a site/service dependent on widespread user-generated content.
- Pay with your twitter account (we already login).
- Paid tier for advanced users who manage multiple accounts.
- BUY straight off a tweet.
- Sell API access to power users (rate limit tiers).
- Remove ads for a fee.
- Push twitter search, and sell more ads on increased searches.
- Sell themselves to facebook.
These are all pretty obvious, so they must have reasons not so obvious not to do them. One would guess twitter's brainstorm meetings are veto-fests just from their lack of interest in doing anything interesting or progressive... but maybe they just don't sweat it because they're sitting on 3B cash. (that must be it)
Most of these are "tried and failed again and again" attempts that have been "obvious" since 1999.
Sure, they could sell "no ads", "exclusive accounts", "developer tools", etc. None of these will entice enough users to be remotely worth it -- as it hasn't worked in most other platforms.
This is for something at the scale of Basecamp or Automattic to make money, not Twitter.
And there lies Twitter's main problem, along with a lot of other startups. Many tech companies should just be small or medium sized. The underlying opportunity was not as enormous as investors predicted. But they've raised billions of dollars now, so they have to at least appear to be trying to force the issue.
Your probably correct, none of these solutions in this thread could actually beat the advertising model even if that isn't profitable for them and trying them isn't worth the risk. It just seems weird to me that twitter basically owns the fanclub for every celebrity in the world and can't monetize access.
I can see how none of these would be the silver bullet, but I can't see how scale is the problem. If you're too big, then, what? Are you saying their burden for profit is too big? The burden they have a reputation for ignoring? And yes, many businesses employing various models have failed, but none of them were twitter. No one is twitter.
Part of it might be the silver bullet syndrome with a hint of exceptionalism. You save it all for that one perfect "exceptional" solution because anything else would be beneath you. Except, how do you know one even exists, or has to exist? Why not just make incremental progress, and run with what takes off? They seem to have chosen ads as their silver bullet, but it failed to exceed expectations. Now what?
The lack of experimentation in the area of services seems almost dysfunctional compared to their willingness to experiment with the interface, their fonts, their top page... all of which are far from exceptional.
What you want from a company like Twitter is at minimum the appearance of effort, of vision, and of competence. Wow, I'm not sure any of those apply right now... No wonder the CEO fired all those people.
Right. If there was a monetization model that worked as well as ads, they would do it in a heartbeat. And so would the entire web. Unfortunately that doesn't exist yet...
No one who runs a web site actually likes putting ads on it. They detract from the content, affect usability and it's more overhead. But it's done because it's the only thing that pays for the site's existence.
Here is my vision for twitter: copy the patreon/twitch/kickstarter model which you should of lead from the beginning. Why can't I subscribe to @lebron_james for 5$ a year and get exclusive lebron james emotes that can be used on twitter? Then @lebron_james has giveaways, product bonus codes, exclusive subscriber only tweets etc. Exclusivity is the new product and people will pay for it. Then lebron's social media team actually has something to do, paying customers, and an incentive to increase quality of his presence on twitter.
If people could sub to @lebron_james for 20$ a year and it got me in ticket/product giveaways, fancy lebron james emotes, a free sneak peak at the next kanye album, removed ads when viewing his feed, and the odd exclusive sub only tweet would people do it?
Twitter is a great product that lacks an effective business model. A similarly influential product that has been used widely for many years (Wikipedia) didn't have to deal with this problem because they are a non-profit.
Maybe the only way to save Twitter the product is to kill Twitter the business.
I don't think Twitter will receive the kind of donations Wikipedia does, from either individuals or institutions. The increasingly toxic nature of discourse on Twitter (whether you agree with what people are saying in a particular instance or not, most viewpoints end up being accompanied with death threats and doxing) makes it unlikely they can make a successful case for filling an important need of humanity.
Frankly i see that kind of behavior spreading across the net in recent years.
I find myself thinking it started with Anonymous getting a bunch of press for similar antics. And over time other individuals and groups have adopted them to further their own goals.
Hell, some of it may well be organized as a kind of online cointelpro.
The problem is that if twitter is stripped down to a protocol/platform, you can't really force ads in there. It's something that can be put in clients. That's what got them in trouble before.
Good point. It's a bad example. In hindsight, what I was trying to get at in the third idea was slightly different to the other two. The first two are methods to capture some of the value they generate. But it's a risky proposition IMHO; when capturing value some of it will be destroyed (kind of like how taxation causes dead-weight loss). There's a possibility that the value proposition hits zero or goes negative, at which point Twitter is dead.
The third, less risky, option would be to capture data in adjacent markets (probably via start-up acquisition). If they capture adjacent data that, when combined with existing holdings, the value they can offer to the 'money' side of their platform (e.g. advertisers, developers) increases more than linearly.
At which point it's safer to 'tax' the money side of their market. Personally, I'd go for advertisers first: unlike developers, advertisers don't increase platform value for the other side of their market (users).
Current liquid assets: $4,381,792,000
Net loss for year: $ 521,031,000
Time to live: 8.4 years
Twitter is a public company with one class of stock. It's ripe for a takeover.[1] Market cap is about $11 billion today, so a straight liquidation is out, but a takeover with a downsizing is likely.
Unfortunately, Twitter's user facing technology has been declining in quality. It's too bad because I like twitter a lot. I can report the following issues:
1) many links to deep inside twitter (eg: user's feed or a particular tweet) will actually bring me to my twitter home page.
2) android app destroys the battery. This is true of many social media apps, but unlike facebook, twitter's mobile web app is barely usable. It keeps insisting that I get the native app and it's extremely clunky and slow. Also, many features aren't there, particularly twitter search.
Back when they were more open with their api and there were alternative clients it was a better experience.
I know none of this has anything to do with their lack of a business model. Also, I don't want to discount their contributions with bootstrap and the big data stuff they've done. Hopefully they won't end up like Yahoo.
Readit News
- Customer Support, twitter is customer support for a lot of companies and being public makes grievance redressal possible. They just need to get better tools and charge companies for being their support interface. The companies may not have choices.
- Events. Twitter is the heart of events. Create tools to manage public events and charge for them. Give something to the organizers and take money for it.
- Pages. Give an alternative business model to facebook. Its too big to fight right now. Give a paid version of facebook pages with a promise of not losing organic growth. Brands spent a lot on getting tons of likes that are not useful any more. Followers are still somewhat valuable. Make pages interesting for brands (give them something to justify the payment).
- Advertising is not always the solution. Customize for the key use cases.
- Open up. Facebook is the AOL of social. Someone needs to step up and be as open as the internet. Aren't you suffocating behind the closed doors? Did you really have a reason for closing them?
I know twitter isn't listening.
A recommended tweets/articles tab a la Pocket's recommendations feed would also bring in a lot of customers for their promoted tweets. The problem isn't ads/sponsored tweets, its how poorly Twitter chooses to present them.
They launched better tools in February. http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1384197/twitter-b...
Other ideas:
- "Enterprise Twitter" for private communications and sharing status updates. Something like Yammer or Facebook at Work or even Slack, though big companies might not want a consumer brand associated with "goofing off" inside their enterprise.
- Flattr-like micropayments to let people "tip" a favorite tweet. This could encourage more people to tweet as a source of income. Like PayPal, Twitter could generate interest off people's tip accounts.
Twitter support is common in CRM already. The company I work for has it in our products and AFAIK so do many others in the space.
Totally agree. But many/most of the proposed solutions typically involve charging the users for basic usage which is completely stupid for a site/service dependent on widespread user-generated content.
Deleted Comment
Per James Altucher, for my 10 ideas a day exercise:
- Pay-to-view, pay-to-subscribe twitter accounts. Exclusivity always sells.
- Twitter tools/analytics for fees.
- Developer tools for fees.
- Pay with your twitter account (we already login).
- Paid tier for advanced users who manage multiple accounts.
- BUY straight off a tweet.
- Sell API access to power users (rate limit tiers).
- Remove ads for a fee.
- Push twitter search, and sell more ads on increased searches.
- Sell themselves to facebook.
These are all pretty obvious, so they must have reasons not so obvious not to do them. One would guess twitter's brainstorm meetings are veto-fests just from their lack of interest in doing anything interesting or progressive... but maybe they just don't sweat it because they're sitting on 3B cash. (that must be it)
Sure, they could sell "no ads", "exclusive accounts", "developer tools", etc. None of these will entice enough users to be remotely worth it -- as it hasn't worked in most other platforms.
This is for something at the scale of Basecamp or Automattic to make money, not Twitter.
Part of it might be the silver bullet syndrome with a hint of exceptionalism. You save it all for that one perfect "exceptional" solution because anything else would be beneath you. Except, how do you know one even exists, or has to exist? Why not just make incremental progress, and run with what takes off? They seem to have chosen ads as their silver bullet, but it failed to exceed expectations. Now what?
The lack of experimentation in the area of services seems almost dysfunctional compared to their willingness to experiment with the interface, their fonts, their top page... all of which are far from exceptional.
What you want from a company like Twitter is at minimum the appearance of effort, of vision, and of competence. Wow, I'm not sure any of those apply right now... No wonder the CEO fired all those people.
No one who runs a web site actually likes putting ads on it. They detract from the content, affect usability and it's more overhead. But it's done because it's the only thing that pays for the site's existence.
If people could sub to @lebron_james for 20$ a year and it got me in ticket/product giveaways, fancy lebron james emotes, a free sneak peak at the next kanye album, removed ads when viewing his feed, and the odd exclusive sub only tweet would people do it?
Maybe the only way to save Twitter the product is to kill Twitter the business.
I find myself thinking it started with Anonymous getting a bunch of press for similar antics. And over time other individuals and groups have adopted them to further their own goals.
Hell, some of it may well be organized as a kind of online cointelpro.
As heretical as these sound, I think there are only three ways for Twitter to generate significant profits (and they all carry significant drawbacks):
- start charging for API calls above some threshold (i.e. charge for market research)
- start charging commercial entities based on number of followers (or volume of tweets)
- use adsense (better user data linkability)
tl;dr - Twitter creates significant value. But it's difficult for them to capture at least some of that value as profit (unlike Facebook).
The problem is that if twitter is stripped down to a protocol/platform, you can't really force ads in there. It's something that can be put in clients. That's what got them in trouble before.
The third, less risky, option would be to capture data in adjacent markets (probably via start-up acquisition). If they capture adjacent data that, when combined with existing holdings, the value they can offer to the 'money' side of their platform (e.g. advertisers, developers) increases more than linearly.
At which point it's safer to 'tax' the money side of their market. Personally, I'd go for advertisers first: unlike developers, advertisers don't increase platform value for the other side of their market (users).
They keep talking about how they were the first at such and such thing. About how they invented this and that thing.
This is the reason why Steve Jobs had the Apple museum removed from 1 Infinite Loop.
They need to start looking at how competition is eating their lunch, instead of living in the past.
[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3055735/fast-feed/twitter-is-ripe...
1) many links to deep inside twitter (eg: user's feed or a particular tweet) will actually bring me to my twitter home page.
2) android app destroys the battery. This is true of many social media apps, but unlike facebook, twitter's mobile web app is barely usable. It keeps insisting that I get the native app and it's extremely clunky and slow. Also, many features aren't there, particularly twitter search.
Back when they were more open with their api and there were alternative clients it was a better experience.
I know none of this has anything to do with their lack of a business model. Also, I don't want to discount their contributions with bootstrap and the big data stuff they've done. Hopefully they won't end up like Yahoo.
That tremendously helped my battery usage.