Th3 Core

fail:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/twitter-buy-button-death/

interesting to know why it failed for them, and not for others.

Their primary publicly traded competitors (Facebook, Google) are profitable and can keep selling the narrative of growth. Plus both of them eventually want to host the entire web. Even with Google's hosting of buy buttons they want to charge by the click (in some cases for channeling traffic from Google.com to Google.com) rather than being reduced to a percent of conversion based fee. Twitter can't credibly claim to have a strategy to "host the web" the way Facebook & Google are doing. So they are shutting down non-core stuff like the buy button, Vine & sold their Fabric developer platform off to Google.

Snapchat may not be profitable, but they are still rapidly growing & are private.

It is very hard to be an online ad driven company that is publicly traded if revenue growth is essentially nil (or at least growing slower than employee stock compensation dilution) if one doesn't have an eventual monopoly platform play outcome to pitch.

I still think the model that would work best for Twitter would be allowing people to charge to be followed (along with allowing those people to set some posts to public & some for paying followers only) & then offer more of like a Wordpress-like feature set for the channel managers.

Interesting idea.  It could work. I wonder if they have ever trialled it.  I guess it would be difficult to keep quiet.

I think the way to roll it out would be to keep current free subs as are, but to have a second tier which can be paid.

And to make it really work, imagine something like...
- exclusive, early access to concert tickets
- live streaming of concerts
- extended content formatting options (like full blogs)
- separate notification options for paid channels (say for those who are subscribing to economic reports or stock market analysis)
- links in the left column for the channels you have paid subscriptions to
- option for free trial (which can only be used once & requires a credit card on file)

I still don't get the difference between the buy button on google, and the buy button on twitter.  For some reason Twitter users are not there to buy but google and facebbok users are?

I think a couple factors would be
1.) scale: massively larger footprint for facebook or google than twitter (even secondary plays owned by those 2 like whatsapp, instagram, youtube, gmail, google maps, waze, etc.) likely have far more usage than core Twitter does
2.) like apple or amazon, both Google & Facebook have plenty of consumer credit card data on file for things like the Google Play store & the social gaming craze that swept Facebook years ago
3.) depth of information ... it is VERY hard to sell anything that isn't dirt cheap using 140 characters. I think when spamming up Twitter with affiliate offers was more commonplace some of the most popular offers were Apple iTunes MP3 sales. large visual ads are also distracting...one loses the native ad blending boost by using those.

But as I don't get the social point of Twitter it will probably always be lost to me.

I see Twitter more as news than social. The format requires a level of concision which is nearly perfect for trolling but makes explaining complex & abstract topics quite difficult.

But I sort of skipped over social in terms of Facebook and the like. If I want to chat with my mom I will just call her, and I don't really "get" Facebook for anything work related...even for industry related gossip & news & such I have historically preferred smaller niche community sites like this one or (back in the day) something like Threadwatch or SearchGuild.

sink in yes..
It really opens up the list of people who might be interested in Twitter to buy.

What it does to the valuation  I don't know.  What do you think? Is it still over valued?

sink in yes..
It really opens up the list of people who might be interested in Twitter to buy.

What it does to the valuation  I don't know.  What do you think? Is it still over valued?

As an isolated play based on ad revenues & primarily bucketed as an ad-based news business it is still vastly overvalued.

Their revenue is growing slower than their stock compensation expenses.

From last September
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters-steep-premium-the-cost-of-employee-stock-grants.html

According to Twitter’s most recent annual filing, the company racked up $682 million in stock-based compensation last year. By comparison, the company’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — which also excludes stock-based compensation — for the year was $557.8 million.

Factoring in the payouts would have pushed Twitter well into the red for the year.

To date they have paid out about $2 billion in stock based compensation since going public. And they are not profitable, especially if one accounts for that expense.

Right now their market cap is about 2.5x what core Yahoo! sold for ($11.68 billion vs $4.8 billion). They are also worth nearly 6X what the New York Times is valued at ($2.12 billion) & the Washington Post only sold for $250 million.

The only way it continues to make sense as an independent company is if they start to layer in some other business model or if they move much (most?) the employee base out of the high-cost bay area bubble.

The problem with either of those is...

• if they try another biz model & it stinks, then their stock crashes & they are acquired by someone else
• if they move out of the bay area they make it harder to pitch themselves as being forward looking to ad agencies & Madison ave branded ad buyers (direct marketers have already tested it & moved on, so they REALLY need the unconstrained & uniformed brand ad budgets)

They can't compete with Facebook & Google on employee pay while remaining profitable. The sense of fail sort of becomes its own driving force at some point. Their employee compensation costs won't really fall until there is a recession, but if they are not profitable by then their stock could easily fall 50% to 70% & then they would either get bought out by a competitor or private equity would take them private & do mass firings.

The big issue with their stock price is it already contains a lot of acquisition price premium in it...they'll need to see that fall before someone is willing to buy them for a price above what they are currently trading at.

Between 2007 & 2011 MySpace went from being valued at $12 billion to $35 million
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/myspace-sold-35-million-news
I don't see as steep a fall coming for Twitter (someone will likely buy them for say $3 to $8 billion) but once the magic of growth wears off the value of social media companies & other ad-based online publishers can fall hard fast. Look how little Yahoo! sold for in spite of their huge install base of email users, instant message users, etc.