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Comment by OldTimeCoffee | Hacker News Reader

If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with (because people would have found it valuable enough to pay for in the first place). In some ways, Twitter has the "news" problem in that people just aren't willing to pay for it. As this says, Internet advertising really isn't that effective, especially on a site that is the equivalent of standing in town square with a megaphone. I think Twitter is tapped out on how much money it can make and drastic changes will just drive users to other places. If you're looking for higher returns a different company might be a better idea.

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What kind of logic is this? Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.

Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.

Most media companies started with ad-supported websites and plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model.

You’re ignoring the competitive landscape. You might pay for Google, but a lot of people would choose to use a free alternative if they needed to pay. The loss in users would give Google less data and make Google less effective as a search engine.

You’re absolutely right about Google but, I think, it’s not necessarily true for Twitter. Their social graph is so important that it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone.

And everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.

>>everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.

If this were true we would not have a long long list of defunct once popular platforms where people used to be, but moved away from in mass after poor decisions by the platform operators.

To believe twitter is immune to the digg, myspace, etc effect is hubris not backed by reality

That’s of course a fair point.

But there are key differences. Twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world. People’s careers and influence are built partly on their follower count and who those followers are. Key users post under their real name.

Digg and MySpace were very different from that.

>>twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world

I think this is over stated, Twitter is used to amplify, or bring attention to some announcment, event, or other communication but twitter itself is not the communication channel, it simply links to the communication channel which is often another platform (youtube as an example) or a website, or some other communication type.

Twitter is advertising, be it paid ads, or the "politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics " advertising their own work directing people off twitter to consume more of that work

Personally I have found very little value and very little substantive communications coming out of twitter, in fact the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme accounts not to find actual information or news

>the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme accounts

Funny how the people who don't use something always know all about it. (Science Twitter is not meme Twitter.)

>>Science Twitter

Well if science is being conducted over twitter that goes along way to explain the terrible state of modern science...

Myspace was for young online people. I was on Myspace. It was tough to even convince half of my friends during that time that being online was fun, let alone being on a social network that didn't really facilitate communication.

Digg was for nerds and nerd-adjacent people. Not sure why you'd even mention it in the same breath as Twitter.

Twitter's scale is so massive, the social graph so varied, that a true replacement is probably years away. It's not impossible for a competitor to take over, of course. Just unlikely.

> it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone

True, but they may leave microblogging behind altogether rather than pay. Twitter just isn't that valuable. Then again, I deleted my accounts four or five years ago.

> social graph is so important that it wouldn’t make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone

Twitter doesn't have as connected a graph as e.g. Facebook. This lets a few hyperconnected users credibly threaten defection.

> Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.

I don't think that's true, because they would charge for access and have ads. These are fairly rare.

>Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.

Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.

>plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model

That's not really true, you have massive consolation because their business model is nonviable any other way.

> Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.

They make money from ads… which people see when they use search.

Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled.

Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing.

But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.

EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.

> Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network.

This logic is backwards. Having a large userbase allows them to sell ads in the first place to the user base that won't pay for the service in the first place.

Pretty much every large tech website has a building phase where they make no money and sell no ads while building a user base large enough to start selling ads. None of the large web companies today have charged to use their product and at this point it's unlikely they could.

>But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.

Which is a terrible argument written by someone who doesn't understand the market. It's like saying no one will move away from AIM in 1999. Yes, people will. There are lots of historical examples, including the Digg to Reddit exodus. Even Facebook itself has had the problem of users migrating away from Facebook. Facebook has literally bought companies where users have migrated to (Instagram/WhatsApp).

> EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps.

Virtually none. No one was paying for TweetDeck and now it's part of Twitter. Consumers aren't using HootSuite or Sprout Social, they target businesses. Going down the Android list most Twitter apps are free, the few that cost anything have small install bases (Fenix 2 <100k purchases, Talon for Twitter is ~ 100k purchases). Twitter has an daily active users of over 300 million users. So maybe 0.1% are willing to pay a one time fee for a client? I don't think Twitter can do much with that.

Virtually no one,on a consumer level, is willing to pay for a messaging service. WhatsApp (one-to-one) is free, Facebook is free (broadcast), Instagram is free, Snapchat is free, YouTube is free, TikTok is free, Skype is free, Zoom is free (to individuals), Google Chat is free, SMS/MMS/RCS usage is free (depending on how you look at the service cost).

On a business level you can extract payments (think Slack), but on a consumer level, messaging has no value people are will to pay (so it's ad supported instead).

What I don't fully subscribe to here is the statement on Stratechery that:

>and given that some of Twitter’s most hard core users use third-party Twitter clients, and thus aren’t monetizable, the revenue per addicted daily active user is even lower

I don't see how this must be true going forward, either by having a standard cost for open access to the API or through inclusion of twitter ads and metrics in the endpoint streams.

As pointed out they are just in the middle of re-opening the API developer ecosystem & it would be a shame to have this reversed by activist investors for the second time.

They could also boost profits by lowering their OpEx. I genuinely don’t know why they need to spend a billion dollars a quarter for a product that really doesn’t change that much and isn’t massively complex.

It would be fascinating to see their engineering backlog.

What counts as complex? Is Facebook complex? Google? How about Netflix?

By the measure of “I can explain how they work in a blog post” none of these are complex. But trust me, operating internet scale services is complex, regardless of how simple they seem from the outside.

The amount of money I’m willing to spend on jeans, electronics, etc. is much higher than the amount I’m willing to spend on Twitter. Makes sense that a service can sell ads for more money than I’m willing to pay for the service.

> If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with

Twitter doesn’t cost $0 because no one thinks it’s worth paying for (demand side), it’s because if they did charge they’d be replaced by someone who didn’t (too much potential supply).

If there was a market of people who would pay for such an app, there would be one on the market to satisfy the demand for it. Supply is irrelevant if there is no demand for it in the first place.

Even taking this assertion, it means there is effectively infinite supply so Twitter's service has effectively no monetary value to the consumer. It's still impossible to charge a consumer for it then (and the costs to provide the service have to be paid by a 3rd party in ads).

Edit: It's very difficult to build a network and get to a critical mass like Twitter. I'm still arguing it's demand constrained (people unwilling to pay) because you would see more viable competitors if it were supply.

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