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A friend asked what I think will happen to Twitter. Here’s my assessment
Twitter’s big problem was their ads business wasn’t great relative to peers. It’s mostly brand advertising which means companies buy it due to ego & relationships not ROI. No one can prove that a Twiter ad or ad on a Seinfeld rerun drove $X in sales.
Elon is driving away brand advertisers and Twitter never figured out ads that drive sales which is now harder due to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.
A possible future for Twitter was someone coming in to cut costs and building a direct response ads business that was resistant to Apple’s ATT changes from scratch. This would’ve been extremely hard but possible.
Elon isn’t doing that. He’s cut costs too fast and too deep. He’s driving away brand advertisers thus reducing revenue and some of them will be gone forever since Twitter cannot prove ROI. He’s not trying to build a direct response ads business. Charging for subscriptions isn’t enough
So as a business Twitter looks extremely screwed. Given there is competition for talent and the low chance of business upside, it’s hard to imagine hiring a strong team to keep the product going.
I expect the product to stagnate over time as small superficial changes can be made (shipping half a dozen badges) while substantial changes cannot. All this with a backdrop of a business that is hemorrhaging money faster than it makes.
@carnage4life Just wait until he finishes that rewrite though…
@carnage4life Isn't it easier to find tech talent with the current state of layoffs happening across the board ?
@cleancoder The tech job market is still strong despite the layoffs. https://www.businessinsider.com/technology-workers-job-market-layoffs-2022-12
@carnage4life @cleancoder And a job market where tech staff has power is bad for Elon, because he’ll lose staff faster than he can replace them.
@carnage4life I would argue twitter’s features stagnated long before Elon. It was just rent charging.
@carnage4life yeah, I think Twitter's only alternative to bankruptcy—assuming no changes—is that they ultimately wind up a much smaller, mainly right-wing site powered by subs, data sales, and whatever other greasy monetization strategies he can think of. I'd still call that "screwed".
Musk hates the ad model because it means they have to conform to the expectations of the civilized world. He probably wants to drop it entirely, but obviously subs can't sustain Twitter at its current size.
@carnage4life So maybe Musk—with a level of focus/restraint we've never seen from him—gets Twitter to the point that it's basically Truth Social. At that point, they won't have to worry about selling ads, but they'll have lost pretty much all the cultural influence that they had when he bought them. They won't be any town square for the world, that's for sure.
He might as well have just set up his own nasty little Mastodon instance, which would've cost significantly less than $44 billion.
@carnage4life totally agreed that they've unnecessarily driven away brand advertisers and it'll be hard to rebuild the product team. I can certainly imagine a hard-right "exploit the base" business model (a la Alex Jones), with a mix of subscriptions, crypto scams, ad sales for supplements and right-wing fundraising, and "pay to play" for "influencers"; paid video could also be an opportunity, probably implementable on the current code base. But hard to know how much it could add up to.
️ @carnage4life actually, instead of being scared of ad $ moving away to not be next to negative tweets, it could sell ads based on the topic being talked about and price being reach/popularity of people talking
@carnage4life Not actually true. Twitter had three tiers of advertising, from the wine-and-dine big accounts, to SMB where you would at least have a rep, to direct-response ads. Any salesperson got a low salary and a bonus based on profits, like any business. (which makes this latest effort seem even worse than you state)
It's on the blog: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2013/survey-how-small-and-medium-sized-businesses-benefit-from-their-twitter-presence
@carnage4life can I be honest for a minute? The reason Twitter ads don’t work? Because, at least in our usage, did not drive traffic or conversion, like.. at all.
@ScaleOvenStove I know. This is why I said they need to build a direct response business.