You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.
Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.
People seem to think Twitter is this almighty power that everyone was begging to work with but actually it's the opposite. Twitter was out there hustling for any relationship they could get.
Twitter had >5 billion in ad revenue. Facebook isnt the minimum threshold for good revenue.
It isn't a winner take all system. Meta might get the lions share, but that doesnt mean there is no room for competition.
Costs are adjusted to get similar ROI. Meta might get more clickthrough per add and command a higher price, but Twitter can compete with more adds for the same price, resulting in the same ROI.
Discord is the closest thing to a successful subscription only social media business. Compare what Nitro offers to Twitter Blue.
Twitter Blue is like buying the “I am rich” app while Discord Nitro solves actual customer pain points.
Discord has about 10% of their active users paying for Nitro by my calculation based on available information. Twitter getting anywhere close to that level is not likely. Discord has been building their service around paid features for years.
Luckily, Twitter has a large and skilled engineering team capable of quickly rolling out valuable new features to entirely change their business model!
(Sidenote: has anyone ever heard of a generally stable ~10 year IPOed tech company pivoting so drastically? It’s insane)
The RoI will be better than alternatives if Twitter ads are cheap enough. TikTok and possibly YouTube aren't profitable either, but they have inherently higher expenses. If Facebook and Instagram can be profitable, that means that there's a profitable company inside Twitter somewhere. I'm skeptical that Elon can achieve this, but that doesn'tean it's impossible.
Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.
This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon
This is a mobile app! You can get a coarse location, good enough to not show me an ad meant for an area 12000 km away. And yet, Twitter could not manage it.
That ISP wasted money by advertising on Twitter. Eventually other brands will realise this as well.
As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.
They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.
Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.
No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…
On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.
Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.
You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.
For example today, I'm watching the World Cup.. Argentina just conceded a goal... I want to see reactions, memes, etc. Too soon for Youtube, uploading videos takes time, TikTok is too random.. Too soon for Tumblr and Pinterest.. Snap format is weird.. Reddit also might have something but I want a shorter format, reactions from known celebrities and sport commentators.. Instagram has some stuff but it is too picture centered... and then comes Twitter, exactly what I wanted, a quick fix of the now, some funny replies, I scroll a little bit, I go back to watching the match.
In the real world people are using Twitter the same as they were before Musk, and if the this trend doesn't change or even improves, advertisers will come back.
If there are eyeballs there are ads. It's a fact of nature (sadly).
Please tell me something that millions of people pay attention to daily that isn't plagued with ads.
The weather outside.
- twitch: parasocial/games - youtube: long videos/reviews - tiktok: short videos/random stuff/zoomers - facebook: friends/stalking/boomers ...
- twiter: microbloging/townhall/news
Totally different use cases with each having a clearly defined space (of course there is some overlap, it is all about human interaction after all).
Google tried this taking on Facebook. It didn't work because network effects cannot force someone to a new network. Heck, it almost killed YouTube in the process of getting Google+ their network.
Why does an advertiser go to Twitter over Meta or TikTok? That’s the real question to be asking.
I’d make the argument that the content format is very nearly irrelevant to the advertisers.
I can understand why an advertiser goes to Twitter instead of more defined niche ad platforms like Yelp, Google Maps, and iOS App Store.
What customer can be reached on Twitter that can’t be reached in Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? In my mind, if advertisers are spooked by Twitter, they’ve got plenty of equivalent alternatives.
* Facebook/Meta: I'm a life long non-facebook user and never will use any facebook product.
* Reddit: I'm on Reddit and have been for a long time but moderators ban people on a whim constantly for the slightest disagreement. My primary account has been banned from several major subreddits for a long time. Any community that grows to any size becomes a cess pool. It also doesn't work for news, as news is delayed by up to a day before getting any kind of traction.
* Mastodon: Becoming a left wing echo chamber that mixes the worst parts of Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter.
* Truth Social: Don't get me started...
* Forums: I still use a number of site-dedicated forums.
Snapchat, TikTok, Hacker News, and LinkedIn are all social media sites. In the sense that you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, sure, these are competitors to Twitter.
But as far as actual content, value, or user experience, none of these are direct competitors. How exactly would the White House or your local school district go about making an announcement on TikTok?
In that sense, I think all the other major social media platforms are direct competitors to Twitter, probably better ones at that considering how often Twitter content is shared around as screenshots and quotes instead of funneling users into data-collecting apps.
The advertisers just want to get their message in front of someone who is paying attention and fits their desired attributes.
Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
Wow. That’s a pretty mean-spirited way to go through life. Why not put your efforts into building something positive instead of trying to tear others down?
Also weird that people were both cheering for Elon to be forced to buy Twitter, then mad that he bought it.
Then cheering for Elon Twitter to fail (hoping for advertisers to leave even before any layoffs were announced) and then lambasting Elon for being so mean to lay off people (how can they stay employed if Twitter's revenue fails?). It's really weird.
Narcissist? The fact that he’s nominally head of 3 companies, trying to execute a dramatic turnaround on one in real time, but still tweets constantly.
Certainly, he has many positive attributes. But, quoting Steve Rogers, I don’t like bullies.
Neurotypicals (and those with higher social intelligence) know you're supposed to pretend to be nice to people who are mean to you.
I find amusing all the mental gymnastics Musk followers are doing these days. It does seem like a personality cult.
I used to look up to him, read one of his biographies, etc; Plenty to admire from his achievements, but his most recent toxic behaviour and shitty management style has really changed that.
Since his success metric for launching Tesla was the success of green tech itself rather than Tesla's market share and his goals for SpaceX were similarly broad rather than purely financial, making a point of trying to make him fail is also negatively aligned with long term civilizational outcomes. It would take a very petty person to hope that we go back to throwing away rockets after a single use, just because they have a beef with the person in and inspired others to build a reusable one.
If you feel that the 2018-2021 era version of Twitter was its ideal state, that's defensible even if a bit odd. But hoping a platform millions love fails, just because of the guy who bought it (and has a track record of doing great things for humanity), then your goal sucks.
I hope he fails hard at this and returns to making rockets. Tesla could disappear at this point and I don’t think it would matter, but SpaceX feels important still.
I think you should focus on what you want to make in the world rather than how to hurt others.
Even within the scope of companies to destroy, Twitter seems like an exceptionally poor target. Is Twitter really so much more threatening than Apple, Google, MS, FB, Tiktok, Tencent, any company marketing cigarettes etc, that it's worthy of setting aside all the productive things you can do with your life and make it your ambition to bring it down?
The amount of negative energy focused at it is downright pathological given its size and impacts, IMO.
“The problem with that goal…is that you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever”
I don’t care about Twitter itself, but I hope that Elon’s cruel and destructive approach fails.
And I’m not so entranced by his self-aggrandizing mythology that I think him failing at Twitter will have any impact whatsoever on adoption of electric vehicles or our ability to get to space. Give me a break lol
Cruel and destructive?
That’s quite the extreme and bizarre interpretation of recent events, and it’s not very charitable. I hope you find something a bit more positive to focus your energies on.
The truth is, neither of us can know what the long term consequences of the leadership change will be but it’s almost certainly not worth doing this to yourself over it.
Happy thanksgiving!
Even if you thought that we could become multi-planetary (incl. not just getting to other planets but living there in our current human form), thinking that Elon Musk is the only person on earth ever who could make this happen is pretty cultish. I mean, come on. Do you really believe he is humanity's savior?
Also, you completely missed the point. Since his ultimate goal with SpaceX is a multi-planetary future, the only way to make him “fail” at that goal is to ensure a single or zero-planetary future for humanity.
Seems kinda dark.
Please take a look at the HN guidelines. The personal swipe in your comment violates them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
You are however redefining the meaning in this conversation or just not really aware that no one here wants that 'mission' to fail, we want Elon's methods to fail because they set a bad precedent for current and future leaders.
It's an unfortunate asymmetry.
If Twitter 2.0 succeeds, then ad-reliant "tech" businesses will be gutted and engineers freed to do more constructive things... if it fails, then one of the most toxic websites--toxic even before Elon, of course--might go under. But I think that's wishful thinking.