> After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000
that should reduce operating expenses significantly, several hundreds of millions dollars?
I mean, not all of the business -- but businesses can and will sever contracts because they lose their favorite point-of-contact.
> They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them
What if those benefits are already pretty slim, and they've been thinking of dropping Twitter entirely, but for the efforts of their Twitter AE?
I don't understand this mindset that all salespeople are fungible drones.
They absolutely will. Media buyers for the gigantic companies expect to be wined and dined very aggressively. Early in my career I worked for an agency that had a couple truly massive EU companies as clients. You know these names. I saw first hand that the personal charisma and relationship of the agency owner was the only reason those execs kept coming back. And he went to very great lengths to stroke their egos.
With buyers that big, there's always another agency. So as soon as the buyer doesn't like something, buh bye.
Advertising spend doesn't work like pharmaceutical sales. They will renew precisely because they like the ROI, whether they get pampered or not, because as advertising channels, social media platform are additive. If it gives you positive ROI, you're strictly better off advertising on a network than not advertising on it, because the social networks themselves are mutually exclusive in terms of attention. That is, you can't access Twitter's eyeball-seconds any other way than through Twitter.
I see no reason to doubt it. But I would need some evidence before believing, and this thread has none (in any direction).
Boom 0 cost, infinite money hack
Tomorrow's news: "HN business man solved the recession"
Edit: per Wapo but you can see the cost structure from 10ks mostly