a) peak at around 200M users b) only manage to monetize $0.50 per user annually?
FB makes $4 per user. You think Twitter won't be able to manage atleast $2? They've barely capitalized on the analytics they perform thus far.
Facebook is games, and photos, and chat, and events, and groups, and coca cola's official page. There are a lot of reasons to visit facebook.
Twitter is short status messages. Basically twitter is about half of what facebook was 5 years ago.
I think the 200 Million number is dishonest. I'm a twitter user, and have been for at least a couple of years...but I think I log into the site and look at it about once a week (here is my twitter: http://twitter.com/blhack). Most of those logins happen over my phone, meaning I don't see the "trending" ads...or any ads at all.
I said that I don't really use twitter. This wasn't always the case. I used to check it probably 10 times a day...but then a new service came along and replaced it for me. It does a better job at status updates...so I switched (and so did most of my friends). This is also a huge problem for twitter. What is twitter giving me that I can't get elsewhere (in my opinion: nothing...doubly so because the new layout is so hideous)
What's the new service?
/Warning: Rant/
Status updates as they exist right now freaking suck. There's not any context, no way to organize them. They're disorganized. I used to always post songs that I liked to my facebook or twitter feed so that I could share them with my friends (as well as find them later). A problem was that I had to search through 5 years worth of statuses to find the songs.
On thingist, it's just a list: http://thingist.com/t/list/38/
I used to do the same thing with quotes. If I found a quote I liked, I would usually share it on facebook or twitter. Same problem as with the songs...and now I have a list for it: http://thingist.com/t/list/51/
Or bars I like: http://thingist.com/t/list/65/
Or things that blow my mind: http://thingist.com/t/list/134/
etc. etc.
The reason why Twitter is successful is that its so simple, there are millions of use cases.
That said, people are willing to fill out extra information about (look at digg, reddit, youtube, fark, etc. etc.)...maybe not for status updates, but thingist isn't about status updates.
Use cases for twitter? I get hashtagging events (I saw this first hand at the intel appup conference last week), but what else beyond that?
If Thingist could automatically categorize my updates, but have a way for me to re-organize them, that'd be ideal. Seems like a decent amount of people fall into your same use case, where they tweet quotes, songs, videos, etc. Some of these would be easier to detect than others, but it's somewhat doable.
This seems some like weird cross section between Twitter, Tumblr, and delicious to me.
Categorizing them is really, really hard to do. Look at the ways that this user uses the site: http://thingist.com/t/item/3051/
"Things that make me feel better when I'm sad" would be impossible to detect programatically.
"Show me all of the links to youtube or soundcloud I have posted" is totally doable, and is something that will probably happen within the next couple of days.
That's the actual problem with Twitter regarding monetization, not the function of the site. Twitter is more a service/platform than a website, and thus Twitter consumption is decentralized. Therefore they're not able to capitalize on their broad reach through ad publishing. It's just as well, since Twitter has shown a staunch unwillingness to place traditional web ads on their site.
If they did have a FB/Google style ad setup, one apparent next step would be to charge for API services, to make up for lost revenue from people not using the official site. Third party developers would be forced to pass on the cost to consumers, most likely through hosting their own advertising.
Since Twitter doesn't seem to want to do that, this leaves customer data as their major capitalizable asset. Therefore the question is how capitalizable all the data flowing to Twitter is.
Yes, and this is the problem. They're providing coders, and bandwidth, and datacenters...and they're trying to do all of it for free. This is fine, and obviously twitter figured out a way to make it work for them (projections for $100 Million in revenue is freaking awesome for them), but I doubt it will go much higher than that.
So, what? All that matters is how much time a user spends on their site.
It's not spam, and the user doesn't deserve to be effectively punished for asking the question.