Hacker News Reader

Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

So as a marketer, how would you pitch Twitter differently to make it more lucrative?

Wrong question. This is like asking "As a carpenter, how would you use this shoe to hammer in a nail?"

Twitter, as it has evolved (or been driven depending how much you trust the vision of its management) is not a lucrative platform. It needs either to change how it connects payers, payees, and audiences drastically (and not just be pitched differently), or it needs the industry to change underneath it. The latter option is not actually that unlikely at the moment.

I think advertising is the wrong model for Twitter.

Every ad I see makes Twitter maybe 5 cents? I'm guessing they earn $40 / year on me (I'm not a heavy uesr). I wish I could just pay them $40 and not have any ads inserted into my stream for the rest of the year.

I would pay 50$ / year to make it add-free. But the again the majority will jump elsewhere in no-time.

Or just use adblock?

Is there an adblocker that works with Twitter?

I use PiHole, doesn't seem to work with twitter.

Both the 5c/per ad and user-willingness-to-pay estimates are way optimistic. Ads you see probably has a CPM (cost per milleu, or thousand) of at $5 on the upper end and I'm guessing average around $1 CPM, which would be .5c and .1c respectively.

Facebook's per-user revenue in the US as of Q4 2015 was around $11/yr (source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-average-revenue-per-...) although its grown by 50% yoy.

Chances are if FB / Twitter / Instagram had high confidence that could monetize their product with a subscription model averaging even $10/user a year I think they wouldn't hesitate to implement such a model.

Yeah, I tried to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt. It's kind of depressing to me that they are willing to make their product shittier to earn a fraction of a penny.

I think comparisons with Facebook are a big part of Twitter's problem. They aren't Facebook, never will be, and shouldn't try to be. If they use Facebook numbers as a benchmark, then they are totally screwed.

You are off by an order of magnitude. Assuming a $5 CPM, you are looking at half a cent per ad. And a $5 CPM is very high for user generated content, especially display. It's likely closer to a $1 CPM if not lower.

It's depressing to me that Twitter is willing to degrade my experience for a fraction of a penny. When I'm browsing from my pay-as-you-go phone (ie expensive data), I wouldn't be surprised if it costs me more to download and display the ad than Twitter earns. That seems very broken to me.

Personally I think celebrity endorsement style advertising is a good match for Twitter. They have all these celebrities with all these fans. On the way to work I think I heard the DJ hawk 2 or 3 different products. I think that's about the only model that doesn't feel forced. Find out what the people with 20million followers like and find out how much those companies are willing to pay for them to talk up the product. Give some endorsement kickback to the celebrity.

It's already happening without Twitter's involvement.

Right, it's hard to see how Twitter can get a cut for themselves as a middleman when it's so easy for someone to make a deal with a spokesperson directly. Unless they start artificially restricting the reach of posts, like Facebook has done. They have already made moves towards making user feeds at least partially algorithmically-generated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com