denisdman wrote:
I don’t follow Twitter investment wise but it generated $5.1B in revenue last year….
but they've posted a net loss every year except 2018-2019 (prime Trump years on twitter, fwiw).
Twitter's user base while on average younger than the general population skews millennial and gen x--under 25's do not engage the platform at anywhere near the rate twitter needs to grow or even to sustain current user numbers. Twitter users are a desirable demographic for advertisers to the extent they tend to be college educated and have higher income than the general population, i.e., people with money. However, the real prize for advertisers are the children of people with money. Those folks are over on TikTok or wherever, not twitter.
Musk's publicly stated suggestions for improving twitter's financials sound like 1st year business student proposals, bad ones at that. Musk talks about decreasing the cost of a premium twitter account and reducing employee head count. Bad moves. While you might want to have fewer twitter employees moderating content and hire more machine learning engineers, no company grows by reducing headcount and reducing price--that's how KMart-Sears is slowly dying the longest corporate death ever. You want to increase the value of the product and that will make the current price more palatable to more users and even allow increasing the price.
Maybe take a page out of Meta/Facebook's playbook and acquire complementary properties. Increase the use of ai/machine learning for moderation and everything else. ML/AI engineers are expensive but worth whatever you have to pay them in the long run. Also, twitter should stop being pissers about API access to the content on their site. Federating twitter's content is like advertising for twitter. The more twitter's content spreads across the internet, the more people get exposed to twitter and eventually begin or continue using twitter.
The best opportunity for revenue growth is twitter's goldmine of tweets and connected user accounts--data, data, data. Doesn't seem like twitter has figured out how to monetize the data they have very well. Not necessarily selling it to 3rd parties, but using the data internally for more targeted advertising and for improving the user experience via improved recommendations. Twitter's recommendations are like the USA Today version of twitter. Go hire some ML engineers away from Spotify to improve twitter recommendations.