Slashdot Mirror
Maybe It's Time For Jack Dorsey To Pick a Company (theoutline.com)
To Jack Dorsey, running two high-profile companies -- Twitter and Square -- at the same time doesn't seem like a problem. In an earlier interview with The New York Times, he said, "I can split my time and be present at both companies every single day." But despite how confidently Dorsey seems about his leadership roles at both the companies, investors and journalists keep asking him this question. And there's a reason why, both the companies are unprofitable (for now, at least), and pretty much every social media app that emerges on the face of the Earth is able to gain more users and figure out a better business plan than the decade-old Twitter. In a column on The Outline, Adrianne Jeffries writes: This question popped up again this week on Twitter's earnings call. Twitter missed its fourth quarter revenue targets. The stock is down and advertising revenue is down. User growth plateaued a year ago. Bloomberg estimated that Twitter has about 140 million daily active users, which was recently surpassed by the much-younger Snapchat. [...] Unlike Twitter, Square has real competitors, including PayPal, Intuit, and Stripe. "Twitter's got a niche where it owns that niche," said Jay Ritter, a professor at the Department of Finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs. "Square, on the other hand, has competition. It is not something where it owns a niche. There are other ways to have easy electronic payments. And consequently, investors are more concerned about, is Square going to be able to get sufficient size that it then becomes profitable? Or is a competitor going to wind up dominating the market?" That's one reason why investors, and probably Dorsey himself, are still seduced by Twitter. While Twitter has seen user growth stall -- a very bad sign for a social network -- it's still able to capture a lot of mindshare, and some investors believe that that means there is still a windfall to be made. Facebook, after all, saw its stock cut in half after its IPO only to rebound and march steadily upward. At this point, it's clear that Facebook has a solid business and terrifying staying power. That's what Twitter investors want: to dominate a market, trap advertisers, and conquer the world. The possibility that maybe Twitter has no competitors because there is no money to be made in microblogging is sidelined. As Ritter said, "Just because it's a winner-take-all market doesn't mean it's a profitable winner-take-all market."
When you're talking about a guy running two different companies, it might make some sense to specifically mention both of them by name in the first sentence or two.
#DeleteChrome
The stock is down and advertising revenue is down.
Last year I spent some money on advertisement on online platforms. 80% of spent went to Facebook, 15% to Google properties, and whatever remaining to Twitter.
The ad platform of Facebook is *the* most sophisticated - the sort of filtering and targeting you can do is detailed, you can build an audience. Twitter is the worst, even the interface is from 1999.
Facebook is not making significant missteps. And Twitter is not taking any steps...forget about missteps. Whoever who's running Twitter should rework their ad platform, then it may or may not make profits.
But the core issue of Twitter...why push for profits? If the inventors were not greedy they could have used the model of Craigslist, remain as a useful public service. There will be enough money for your needs, not your wants.
Tat Tvam Asi
Twitter is out of control and it's obvious that there is no leadership at the helm. They're banning accounts left and right, and typically without any serious reason. Or when they do it's over something mildly offensive. Meanwhile Twitter leadership acts like 12k calls to assassinate the President don't constitute unimpeachable grounds to bring down the banhammer.
So remember kids, you can't say "I hate n----s" on Twitter if your account comes off as white. That's a violation of their community standards, but committing a federal felony in what you write, that's Twitter's idea of protected speech.
The only question at this point is who is dumber, the board or shareholders, as no one is bring Twitter into court to explain why Twitter is letting inmates run the asylum and just as important... how many tens of millions of wasted engineering manhours have been wasted on this bullshit.