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Can Twitter Survive By Becoming A User-Owned Co-Op? (salon.com)
What's going to happen now that Twitter's stock price has dropped from $66 a share to just $18? An anonymous reader quotes Salon:
A small group of shrewd Twitter users and shareholders have come up with proposals to fundamentally restructure the way Twitter is controlled, to turn the company into a public service by removing the need to feed investors' ceaseless appetite for hitting quarterly growth benchmarks... Sonja Trauss, a Bay Area housing policy activist, and Twitter shareholder Alex Chiang proposed earlier this year a resolution for the company's recent annual shareholder vote to promote ways to get Twitter users to buy stock in the company, such as offering ways to buy shares directly through the Twitter website and mobile app. If many individual Twitter users each owned a small piece of the company, then they could participate collectively (through the annual shareholder voting process) in steering the direction of the company.
The idea makes sense from a labor standpoint. Twitter's value comes from user's tweets, which provides the backbone for digital advertising revenue. Twitter also sells this user-generated data to third parties that use it mainly for market research. This bloc of user-shareholders could theoretically overtake the control major institutional shareholders...have over the company. Because a lot of owners of a few shares of the company would have little to lose if the stock price doesn't grow or wavers, Twitter would be less beholden to meeting Wall Street's often brutal expectations.
The idea makes sense from a labor standpoint. Twitter's value comes from user's tweets, which provides the backbone for digital advertising revenue. Twitter also sells this user-generated data to third parties that use it mainly for market research. This bloc of user-shareholders could theoretically overtake the control major institutional shareholders...have over the company. Because a lot of owners of a few shares of the company would have little to lose if the stock price doesn't grow or wavers, Twitter would be less beholden to meeting Wall Street's often brutal expectations.
That isn't a Co-op. It is just trying to sell stock to individual investors. These people have no idea how public companies are run. Unless you own a significant portion of the shares you aren't changing anything.
How the hell does twitter lose money? Why does it have 2500 employees? What the hell does it spend $3 Billion a year on?
The problem with twitter is cost containment. The folks running it don't know how to run a business, they just know how to court investors.
I'm not calling for draconian MBA cuts that would gut the company, but I am generally curious on why they're spending ~$800 Million per year (2015) on RnD. Their product is already made, they only need a few people to make micro improvements to it. I don't see how they can justify spending the entire market cap of AMD in a year (2015 numbers).
Cutting the RnD budget by 3/4ths would cut the redline in half, and would have no impact on their core product.
I think MBA's running tech companies typically kill the company. But in this case, twitter really needs one of those slash and burn old school industrialist from non-tech industries.
Gee Comrade someone piss in your oats this morning ?
Given the makeup of Twitter's shareholders and users it's much more likely you'd have nasty little groups with attitudes like yours trying to silence whoever they hate most at the moment.
Twitter is like a cut-down version of a global IRC with fancy filtering. If twitter disappears, I expect that something else will quickly replace it.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The amazing thing about Twitter is that when you are forced to condense your thoughts into piece-meal slogans you are forced to truly consid