Twitter Kills The #Dickbar
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
You cannot attract a mass of users, give them a nice UX, build a community - and then one day throw ads all over to place, call it a monetization strategy and keep a straight face.
Twitter is going to have a very hard time monetizing their platform, if the #Dickbar is the best they came up with at this point. If I were them, I would be afraid.
Really? Google did essentially that to great success, as has Facebook (perhaps with less clear-cut success, but clearly not to the sort of outrage Twitter received over the QuickBar).
Twitter can still get some context out of the user but they will forever have the problem that most of their ad impressions will not be connected to the user actively searching for something. Google's an advertising monster for a reason, and it's not as simple as "They had a big bully pulpit in the form of their search engine".
Twitter went from no ads to AN INTRUSIVE AD YOU CANT ESCAPE AND RUINED YOUR NORMAL EXPERIENCE. Google on the other hand went with very low touch text ads, then added ads to your email etc... such that there are a lot more ads on Google now then there were, but it was done so gradually and with so much A/B testing that we care less.
They've loosened up a bit since then, though..
In search, you are actively seeking something out - you enter a phrase, it returns a result. This meshes beautifully with ads - because in the ideal, an ad matches what you're looking for, except it may want you to buy the end result.
Tweets, totally different. With tweets - you are effectively either pushing information to a specific group (your followers) or you are accepting pushed information from those you follow.
This is much more intimate of a conversation as the tweets you're accepting by following come from real people, or entities/groups that you associate/identify with or are otherwise interested in their info; such as a news stream.
To interject ads into this communication is much more akin to you standing at the bus stop with your friend and you're talking about where to go for lunch and being approached by some random stranger saying "Hey I think you guys would really like Coke!"
You already KNOW what coke is, so this random person is not adding any value to the conversation that you're having with your friend.
Between google and twitter, we are looking at the age old problem with content relevance in push/pull context.
People are ok with advertising in general. I think this has more to do with the implementation, not that people are opposed to ads on twitter in general.
So while we are "OK" with it in those mediums or activities - those are passive activities in which you basically view/listen to whatever content they choose to put on the stream.
Search is 100% active, where twitter is a hybrid - but the problem with ads in twitter is contextual relevance + value.
They will either clutter a conversation which you follow, or lack context and relevance thus just driving you mad.
Instead, I have suggested that Twitter needs to stop trying to monetize its current incarnation - but needs to build upon the platform and pivot a bit.
I sugggest that due to the fantastic job they have done in gaining both wide adoption but also mass appeal with celebrities and influencers, they need to expand the platform to provide more content from those users and then monetize with revenue sharing.
Basically, you would have tweets coming from Lady Gaga in the current form the do today - yet if she wanted to tweet about her new album, a link she could send would drive all the traffic to an exclusively announced twitter page with details of the album and the ability to buy it there. Additional ads could be placed on that expanded content page by twitter.
Album sales go to lady gaga - the ad money goes to twitter.
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They need to build out a blogging platform that allows for deeper, richer content.
Tweets are great for high-level, hyper responsive communications and awareness driving, but the fact is that no matter what you think of tweets and their succinctness they are too small to convey 99.9999% of information people want to convey. Tweets ALREADY serve to make groups aware of something, then drive them to more/better resources for information about that event.
IMO - Twitter needs to acquire. Tumblr, posterous, whomever. Mate the products and provide ad-rev channels based on the two.
@Jack could oversee ensuring that the two properties welded together maintain a level of simplicity and elegance - but greater functionality is needed.
If twitter revolutionized the micrblog, expanded to miniblogs and allowed very simple, concise miniblogs and maintained a level of control over the presentation (ala facebook) They could be exceptional.
Of course, there is the outstanding issue with stability, but that will be fixed I am sure...
Searches for "Japan Tsunami" and "Justing Beiber" are not revenue generating searches. Twitter's searches are only marginally monetizable.
The first one probably isn't, but it's not too hard to imagine monetizing the second search. You might need automatic spelling correction, though.
Twitter has got to find some way to monetize or they will die. Simple. I wouldn't mind a few highly relevant ads in my timeline if it means keeping the service free. They already know what I'm interested in. Or, others might value the service enough to pay a small fee to not be served ads. Either way, right now we're all getting something pretty great for free and it's not sustainable. I would rather get served a few ads for products that really interest me than see the service go away altogether.
Do you really believe this? Is the literal experience described, of a stranger injecting semi-relevant commercial comments into a conversation you were actually having, really something you, yourself, would find pleasant??
I feel as though there's a huge population of marketers who don't put themselves enough into the shoes of consumers to realize that this kind of things feels invasive, not helpful.
It's like marketers start with general point that relevant display ads work better than irrelevant display ads and assume that maximum customization of an makes it maximally appealing to the average person.
You don't realize that a person doesn't actually want any feedback from a company at random and that "personalizing" brand advertising just makes it creepy (as oppose to personalizing informational advertising, which makes it more useful).
I don't want my favorite company in the world injecting even relevant comment into my ordinary conversation. If I wanted to hear from them, I'd ask them. (and Facebook's right column just gets creepier).
And I also don't feel the analogy is apt. To use the well-worn metaphor of Twitter as cocktail party, it's like having a conversation with your friend about, say, Arduino's, and having the host, whom you don't know, walk by and say "Oh yeah website X is having a great sale on those", and then they're off again to serve Jell-O shots. I chose to go to Twitter's party, so at least I'll nod politely to the host because they're the ones providing the free booze.
Hey, I'm not against them monetizing.
But to monetize, they have to find an ad-format that works. And to find an ad format that works, they can't pretend targeting by itself will do what they need.
Realistically, for example, I think people would prefer a party where host have big "Bud" posters up to a party where the host interrupts individual conversations semi-relevant ads.
Twitter can monetize with plain, ordinary advertising.
The problem is this be admitting that Twitter's segment of the Internet is basically the relatively low-value part of the Internet and that Google's part is the higher-value part. That wouldn't make Twitter impossible, it would just take away from the huge valuation it has. And that could be a problem for a lot of people.
Their second biggest mistake was admitting that it was a mistake. You don't do that--well, unless it involved something serious, like a user's privacy (think Buzz and Beacon).
I have no problem with people/companies calling something a mistake where another would put PR fluff. At least it implies that your users/customers have legitimate standards other than "take it and like it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
It seems you meaning not admitting mistakes/showing weakness. I agree companies should admit mistakes in the present era.
I think we'd all like to think that people at Twitter are the cutting edge of whatever, Web Scale, but the people who work there are in a bubble of what they're told just as much as people at other companies. When you're in the middle of an industry it's hard to be objective, increasing the odds that something like this would be thought of as a good idea. So whatever, now Twitter's got their own Microsoft Bob. At least it's dead AFAICT.
As to not admitting it was a mistake... I'm saying you don't apologize for the DickBar. It didn't work, learn something from it, and move on. But clearly, Twitter was far too short-sighted that they didn't even have a backup plan, or competing ideas as simple as... "what would happen if we instead moved the ads to the bottom?" AdMob already bombards many users this way. Would that work?
And as mentioned, I don't have a problem with companies apologizing if they royally screwed up--I mentioned two specific cases where it was warranted. But apologizing every time someone with a blog ridicules a feature/ad model? Not a good sign.
We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this.
'Incredibly high usage metrics' - sounds pretty good for the purchasers of their sponsored trends, no?
Now, Twitter could be lying about the Dickbar's usage, but I doubt it. Lying involves conspiracy. It sledgehammers the morale of honest employees. The truth's likely to leak. The leadership of Twitter's not that stupid - if they mention incredibly high usage metrics, it's because there were incredibly high usage metrics.
So, if Dickbar was great for monetization, why remove it? I suspect it got yanked because it conflicted with a higher priority - control over the client. If the vast majority of users love the Dickbar, but a small sliver of people were turned off enough by it to start using an alternate client, that throws the Tweetdecks of the world a lifeline at a time when Twitter would rather they drown.
After the Tweetdecks have transitioned to enterprise tools or simply given up, then Twitter can launch Son of Dickbar. Until then, growing client market share is way, way more important than prematurely boosting monetization. It's not like Twitter lacks access to capital.
This is called "saving face," and it's something that people do when they have to backtrack on a mistake.
and it made its way into a release? huh?
I suspect the "junior product manager"'s name is Richard Bahr.
Why not just put trending items between "pages" when the user scrolls through tweets, each one about the height of a tweet? (one per page so that it's not too overwhelming)
I suppose one option is to move the bar to just the search area, where people are willfully looking for particular types of information.
I fully expect some version of #dickbar to be back someday once they've worked out the technology for showing relevant updates, they just tried to implement it before its time.
I guarantee you that by next year there will be a way to do this right.
If Twitter could have deployed the bar to a hundred or so real users, I think they would have quickly found that people mostly hated it.
I believe you're allowed to distribute test versions of your app to 6-ish handsets for testing, but I'm sure this barely covers the internal folks at Twitter. It'd be nice if they'd had the option to do some more thorough early testing. (Whether they would have done so, or would have listened to the results is outside my point).
People won't switch to some other short message sharing service, they'll switch to a non-Apple phone.
Nah, they'll probably use the web UI or some other native client that supports Twitter.
As for a limited rollout, they could've rolled a new binary and only turned on the feature for, say, 100 users selected at random.
Be careful with this - developers have previously gotten into trouble for having functionality for users that differs from that for reviewers. You'd have to also add a way for the reviewers to review the "limited rollout" functionality.
You just put it in a feature flag. The app can check w/ Twitter if that user has the flag enabled.
More on Feature Flags: http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/flipping-out/
-David
Raise your hand if you believe this.
"Dickbar"? What are we, 12 year old jersey-shore fans?
(I've actually been wondering where the name came from, and asked a few times, but never got an answer. I assume that it was his idea, then?)
To be honest, though, I spend a ton of time reading technology news, and had no idea who Dick Costolo was until right now, so I don't know that it's really safe to say "everybody".
Perhaps Dorsey coming back is kindof "New Coke"?
"dickbar" stuck because "dick" is a word with negative connotations that refers to the male anatomy. The fact that it's the guy's name simply makes for a cute cover story.