Twitter's User Problem: Fastest Gains Are People That Don't See Ads
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I have an account for one of my projects that I use to announce new releases and updates. This happens once every few weeks, so I would pay for an option to stick my tweet at the top of my followers' feeds for, say, a week. If Twitter would then also allow people to unstick a tweet after reading it (or opt out of sticked tweets altogether), I think it'd be a great and welcome feature to have for everyone involved - TWTR gets paid, I get more eyes on my tweet and others won't miss my updates, which is what they followed me for to begin with.
I really like your idea of a stickied tweet but they should probably automatically unstick it once you've seen it.
* Sally makes a tweet at 8AM
* Bob doesn't check Twitter until noon
* Bob doesn't scroll down, the tweet at the bottom of the screen is timestamped 11:30AM
In this scenario Twitter never displays Sally's tweet in Bob's timeline. It is thus not an impression. If Bob had scrolled down to see tweets going back to 8AM Twitter would display Sally's tweet in Bob's timeline, this would count as an impression.
If you're asking if they know that you actually read, parsed, comprehended, or contemplated the text of the tweet then no of course not. Likewise somebody clicking on a link doesn't mean they actually read, parsed, comprehended, or contemplated that content.
There are numerous, straightforward solutions to this. Twitter can require third party apps to show ads, for instance. Twitter can continue to copy functionality from third party apps and then squeeze them down. Or Twitter can worry about this once they are monetizing the bulk of their user base at 99% of the potential.
I think this is genuinely a challenge for Twitter to solve, but I suspect (hope!) internally they spend much more time worrying about getting more users, how to meaningfully innovate and how to make Twitter more essential for the majority of their "sometimes" users.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/twitte... http://mashable.com/2012/08/16/twitter-api-big-changes/
Their ability to do this, incidentally, is why I hate oAuth.
Since Twitter removed the option to create ads that target users worldwide, it's impossible to create a campaign that displays ads to users in less populous countries.
Has Twitter made a deliberate decision to not monetize their "long tail" foreign users?
Yet rest (or don't) assured that users in at least couple of those countries do observe promoted tweets, pinned here and there in their timelines. Apparently there is a way.
One real value of Twitter, Google+, and Facebook is the quality of what people you are following post. The other (and larger for me) value is promoting my blog. Every time I write a new blog entry, I shamelessly promote it on social media.
This is probably a crazy idea, but I wouldn't mind if these services had "hybrid" paid services: Pay a relatively small monthly or yearly fee, still see just a few advertisements, but much fewer advertisements than the free versions that are more geared to my interests than those advertisements that might make more money for the companies providing the series.
Businesses now have to compete with open source or decentralized services that cut them out. When money enters the equation, people immediately start shopping, they start asking "Is this an expense that is necessary?"
That plus the amount of uncertainty john q public has on transmitting money online (a reticence I share to be honest), makes paying small fees a large barrier to entry.
Besides, if I've learned anything, I've learned that just because you paid a company money, doesn't mean they won't turn around and sell you up the river. The barriers of trust for a service that's free and non-free are exactly the same.
You can get around bandwidth bills through distribution. open source is very good at that.
Google and Facebook are not in the document copying business. They index, curate, store and generally make information easy to access. That's a real service which costs real money to offer, and is not going to be just spontaneously overtaken by some FOSS equivalent (whatever that even means). And they could charge real money for it, if they wanted. Personally I would welcome that opportunity if it meant they would treat me more like a customer and less like an ad demographic.
Barriers to entry for these tools are: the technical expertise to setup and run the programs (which is low low low, but still enough), and the obvious lack of users to give the system meaning.
Was? It still is. The number of companies that rely solely or primarily on advertising to generate revenue is pretty small compared to those that charge their customers.
I suspect you're almost surely right when it comes to the number of companies, but I'd be far more interested in seeing analysis on this broken down by volume of dollars / revenue.
For instance, most (all?) professional and even college sports, TV shows, numerous web companies, etc. -- tons of ad revenue, though perhaps relatively small number of companies, but is why I'd be curious to see data on this if you know of any?
We don't really need to filter companies that are solely or primarily dependent on advertising. We can compare the entire amount of money spent on advertising (which is a superset of what we're really looking for) versus everybody else (which is just total revenue minus advertising revenue) to see it's not even close.
One source[1] for global ad spending puts it at $467 billion (for 2010), I couldn't find more recent hard data but another[2] estimates it at $581 billion for this year. Let's assume the estimate was right and round up to $600 billion.
WalMart had revenue of $476.3 billion last year[3]. You can combine WalMart and any other company in the top 10 of Fortune's Global 500 and their combined revenue would exceed total advertising revenue[4]. The combined revenue of all 500 is $31.1 trillion[5], even if that included every penny of ad revenue it would still be a ratio of 50:1
[1] http://www.wpp.com/wpp/press/2011/dec/05/groupm-forecasts-gl...
[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-adver...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
Maybe I'm misunderstanding...perhaps you were referring only to businesses selling access to a web service?
Also Twister[1] based on BitTorrent + a blockchain for user registration.
But of course these will never take over Twitter's kingdom.
Another alternative would be a business model that doesn't include advertising. App.net[1] attempted this, but clearly that didn't work out too well.
Our current walled gardens succeeded by refining the user experience of the open web they supplanted. They made it easy for normal users to do the things that only advanced users were able to do before: easily publish your own stream of content, find other people's content you care about, aggregate other people's content, and then let everybody generate new content that references the previous content.
None of that is new functionality, but Facebook and Twitter fixed the user experience and taught normal people how to do all of that.
But now that the bar has been raised and the average user groks the benefits of "social networking", there's nothing to stop the technology from eventually being commoditized.
As for business models, a decentralized competitor doesn't actually need a business model, because their infrastructural costs could be zero. "HTTP" doesn't have or need a business model.
No Tweetdeck user views ads, even though Twitter owns and operates the software. The only alternative for PC users is Hootsuite, and it is browser based. For anyone who wants to have multiple columns open at the same time or have notifications of direct messages or @replies, Tweetdeck is (essentially) the only game in town.
Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr all followed the same path: nice, functional interfaces that were needlessly complicated over time.