Put another way, they used to be hosting a huge party and just had to work out how to turn that into cash. Now people are starting to leave the party, making cash less of a concern at that point.
Did you and I fall into different categories or something and somehow that led to you receiving invasive marketing where as all I ever see are a few promoted tweets? Pretty curious about this because you mention that your experience is happening to a large portion of the user base.
Only visit occasionally now.
As for what I had said in the parent comment, what I was trying to imply was that something has happened recently that has disengaged a significant (different than large portion, specifically meaning not insignificant) portion of its user base as evidenced by the deceleration in user growth. Apologies for any confusion. :)
What notifications were you seeing? I'm trying to think what I would receive that wasn't another user interacting with me and all I can recall is something along the lines of 'User1, User2, ..., all liked User3's Tweet' where User1 and User2 were people I followed. But it was very strange because every now and then I get those notifications for high profile accounts and other times it would be like two friends liked a third friends tweet. Those notifications were quite sporadic though and don't bother me in the least.
It probably depends on who you follow and how connected they are. I get these notifications sometimes multiple times a day.
Scaling up is difficult for such products...
It doesn't matter to consumers that a business needs to monetize...they don't care; they weren't even aware that it needed to...they are satisfied with the product they know, as is...
This is something we in the industry get wrong, so often...
Twitter allows me to follow writers and influencers like Malcolm Gladwell, William Gibson, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, to niche industry influencers ranging from Rails engineers to industrial designers to photographers in a way that is digestable and at times personal. To me, it's been edifying to read thoughts from them, discover work they've created as it happens, or find out about a book they recommend.
Twitter is literally what you make of it. Follow interesting people, you get interesting content.
I know that the next day, or the day after that, worst case scenario, anything immediately relevant to me, or my community, will appear in my local newspaper, or RSS feed...
I live locally, in the short run, globally in the long run...
That's what devalues Twitter to investors...it's just "entertainment...it can easily be given up, without any real consequences...there are other more refined sources for what it offers...
It's surprisingly hard to find people who consistently say interesting things in such a restricted space.
Overall, I've decided it was so hard that it just wasn't worth my time, so I no longer read Twitter at all.
Obviously, your mileage may vary.
* Never follow accounts with blue checkmarks.
* Take the words of very popular accounts (even if they have no checkmark) with a grain of salt.
* Use your account to converse or pontificate, not to advertise your personal brand.
* Avoid jokey one-upmanship. It is tedious.
* Avoid detailed explanation until prompted. Brevity makes for misunderstandings.
* Follow people you do not know personally.
* Follow artists.
* Follow journalists.
* Follow minorities.
The reason to use Twitter is to get perspectives that have no other outlet - no advertising, no backing, no organization behind them. These are voices that are so faint that they could be tuned out any other way, and they don't get covered in the paper the next day, because they're going outside of the narrative lines. That is why you do better avoiding the blue checkmarks and people who would strive for them.
Look how much people will spend on Android apps when they're a dollar or three. Make things really cheap, and people will buy them: they'll do a lot of impulse purchases when things are cheap enough.
If news articles only showed you part of the article, and then demanded $0.02 to read the rest, I could see a lot of people paying that. Considering how little they get paid for ad impressions (fractions of a cent), direct payments like that would be more profitable, and readers wouldn't care that much about spending pocket change on it.
But there's no way to make a functioning micropayment system currently. It's not feasible to have credit-card payments for sub-$1 transactions because of the high per-transaction fees, and Visa/MC have a cartel going where you have to use them for any kind of credit/debit payments.
SV needs to figure out how to make easy, low-fee micropayments a reality, and then we'll see some change.
Unless one has balls enough to factor in debt in micropayments. You sign up users and make them agree to pay those .02 at a later time and when you're down five dollars the usets need to pay to continue. It's risky but with enough margin to cover the insolvents it could work
Allegedly a Facebook user is worth $128 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/07/youre-wo...).
Paying $5 to acquire a micropayment customer sounds cheap.
Wow, I would say Twitter and Linkedin are vastly overvalued compared to Facebook.
I mean, linkedin has a legit monetisation strategy just as a socially connected CV platform for recruiters to find people - and charging recruiters for tools to use it effectively.
That seems far far stronger than what I know of twitter. Facebook - well what I really want to know is more detailed metrics like median time spent on it per user, interactions per user, etc etc. I'd be fascinated to know if the trends are downwards.
LinkedIn's strategy is, as you said, a socially-connected CV platform so that recruiters can find people and hook them up with jobs, and make a big commission in the process, so LinkedIn charges recruiters a hefty fee for access to people. Ad-blockers aren't going to have any effect here: the recruiters still have to pay to send messages to people. It seems like a much more sound business strategy, as long as professionals still need jobs and there's recruiters looking to place them in jobs. It might not have the mass appeal of the inanity of Facebook or Twitter (since only a fraction of the population is of the demographic that would find it worthwhile to use LinkedIn; someone working as a barista or a Walmart cashier would not), but it certainly isn't subject to the same fickleness that those two are. All it'll take is some other inane social media platform to rise up for people to share dumb videos on and for FB/Twitter to do something dumb to piss off people, and suddenly they could become the next MySpace. LinkedIn's position is much stronger, as long as they don't screw it up trying to achieve the popularity of those other two.
This logic says a company in beta valued at $1 mil is worth $100k / user for the 10 beta testers. Not at all.
Hey I'm not saying these are necessarily awesome ideas, but if your ship is showing signs of starting to sink, doing crazy things like adding features to your product may not be all that crazy.
If making money ever isn't the main goal of a business, that truly are screwed.
That said, I've long believed that Twitter would be one of the first to fail when the tech bubble pops. They don't have a product people are willing to pay for.