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Twitter Is 'Toast' and the Stock Is Not Even Worth $10, Says Analyst (cnbc.com)
Twitter is "toast" as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service. From a report on CNBC: The microblogging platform's chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and "take some time off", while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday. Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year. The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted "uber-bear" on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is "toast" and "not even a $10 stock." "Many investors were foolishly building (an) investment thesis based on complete stupidity," Chowdhry wrote. The analyst said that Twitter's data quality is "horrible". Chowdhry said that many pollsters used Twitter data to predict a Hillary Clinton win in the U.S. election but the fact that Donald Trump won shows that data quality is poor. One reason for this is too many fake users on the platform, Chowdhry claims.
Regardless of your opinions of Trump, it seems pretty ignorant to suggest that Twitter shutting down would completely de-fang him.
It is almost like you're implying that the shutdown of Twitter equates to the shutdown of social media as a concept.
Let us return to the times when a stock's value depended on the P/E ratio and not the mythical confidence fairy.
It's been clear to a number of us that Twitter's primary users are more on the social side of the spectrum, lean more to the left, are engaged more in arts and all that, but all of the news snippets over the past year or so seem to come out after the company articulated publicly that they are more or less an SJW platform, that they're going to selectively ban questionable comments under the guise of anti-racism, etc., etc.
Maybe I'm wrong but the timelines literally suggest that Twitter's failure was its political alignment rather than providing a neutral grounds for socializing.
I think the unprofitable nature of the thing is what is not "a viable business," identity politics or no.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I've tried several Twitter alternatives some in beta some not and unfortunately, most of the things I dislike about Twitter I dislike about them as well. You can join a network that has a strong anti censorship stance and this seems like progress but then you end up with almost unending amounts of hate and vitriol in excess even of Twitter. Even on platforms populated by people on my side of the political isle (libertarian republican types)... it is just unpleasant and unhealthy and gets old fast. I don't know how you take a global broadcast like platform and make it into something palatable.
Virtually everyone predicted a big Hillary win and virtually everyone was wrong.
I have a theory about that.
There was a palpable Anti-Trump PC thing happening. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as a Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary statement could have ended in an online dogpile of people shouting "Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Transphobic, Islamophobic, Xenophobic" so people kept their thoughts to themselves until they got to the one place where they could express themselves without external pressure, the voting booth.
You can't fault Twitter for misreading the tea leaves just like pretty much everyone else.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In "The Internet Is Not the Answer" by Andrew Keen *, he points to some of the problems with today's web services: As opposed to the Internet's golden days of public standards and open protocols, today they are mostly centralized proprietary "winner takes all".
And the reason is simple: When Paul Baran, Bob Taylor, Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, et.al. invented their respective contributions, they were often government employees and as such not seeking or able to pursue monetary gains based on their inventions, or vehemently opposed to do so. They also understood that their protocols had to be public and open in order to be widely adopted.
In today's Internet economy, the goal is not universal standards or federated networks (e.g. email, PSTN), but rather reaching critical mass in walled gardens. If you can show you have amassed enough users, your company gets valued billions. IPO, vest, rinse and repeat. So if there was a public social network protocol, you could jump ship, just as you can with a domain and email today. That would not be in th interest of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp . Much better ride the curve till the next bust.
*) Skip the book; it's a long rant, a gets a bit dull, even if Keen is a good writer.
I'm not even sure it has value as a service. Have you ever tried to engage meaningfully on twitter? It's a good platform for celebs to push their endorsements, political candidates to spout their dogma and all matter of people trying to become famous and important by chasing followers, but meaningful interaction is almost nil. Everyone talks but nobody listens. A social network should be social, and twitter really isn't. The most popular only send tweets and don't really respond. In many cases they are paying others to actually do it for them.