Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model?

Given that impact, I can see why Elliott Management would look at Twitter and wonder why it is that the company can’t manage to make more money, but the fact that Twitter is the nexus of online information flow reflects the reality of information on the Internet: massively impactful and economically worthless, particularly when ads — which themselv... See more

tweets on Twitter and photos on Instagram are public by default, and anyone can follow anyone. The default medium, though, is fundamentally different: Twitter has photos and videos, but the heart of the service is text (and links). Instagram, on the other hand, is nothing but photos and video (and link in bio).

I also think this makes Twitter’s other subscription offerings, like Super Follows, Revue, etc., more attractive, not less; the biggest challenge in running a subscription business is earning that first dollar, but once a user is paying it’s relatively easy to charge for more.

That ties into Twitter’s third big problem: the number of people who actually want to experience the Internet this way is relatively small. There is a reason that Twitter’s userbase is only a fraction of Instagram’s, and it’s not a lack of awareness; the reality is that most people are visual, and Twitter is textual. Which, of course, is exactly wh... See more

Twitter could still do that, and pursue other initiatives like its revitalized API, offering developers the opportunity to build entirely new experiences on Twitter’s information flow (including unmoderated ones). The difference from the first go-around is that Twitter won’t have an advertising business to protect, and thus will have its interests ... See more

So let’s review: there is both little evidence that Twitter can monetize via direct response marketing, and reason to believe that the problem is not simply mismanagement. At the same time, Twitter is absolutely essential to a core group of users who are not simply unconcerned with the problems inherent to Twitter’s public broadcast model (includin... See more

The implications of this are vast. Sure, you may follow your friends on both, but on Twitter you will also follow news breakers, analysts, insightful anons, joke tellers, and shit posters. The goal is to mainline information, and Twitter’s speed and information density are unparalleled by anything in the world. On Instagram, though, you might follo... See more

What makes Twitter such a baffling company to analyze is that the company’s cultural impact so dramatically outweighs its financial results; last quarter Twitter’s $1.3 billion in revenue amounted to 4.4% of Facebook’s $29.0 billion, and yet you can make the case — and I believe it — that Twitter’s overall impact on the world is just as big, if not... See more

Actually charging for Twitter would, of course, reduce the userbase to some degree; moreover, there are a lot of users with multiple accounts, and plenty of non-human users on Twitter. And, of course, Apple and Google would take their share. Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly ov... See more