All sorts of very mis guided comments below. Here are some points:
1/ Im an advertiser I can tell you that big brands still love the platform (and spend heavily)
2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful?
3/ Balance sheet has $1bn+
4/ NFL deal is huge, ditto bloomberg streaming
5/ Product needs to ship much quicker than Facebook does to stay relevant
6/ It is the only place that has nailed real time properly, if there is a bomb in a major city you will hear it first on twitter no where else has this edge, nowhere
7/ The worlds most important people are on this platform and readily accessible in most cases, not true on FB in terms of accessibility
8/ 80% Gross Margin business
9/ Needs to stay independent and ramp up advertising spend once logged out tweets ad product rolls out
10/ True reach of Twitter is almost 1bn users when we consider tweets appearing on TV, off the platform, in newspapers etc. This is comparable to FB
Some of the ignorant stuff people are saying about all the employees is disrespectful.
WhatsApp and IG when they were acquired were making very little money, if they had stayed independent and no one acquired them they would not be running today (they would exhaust the capital chain). WhatsApp maybe was making £10ml a year but was losing money; IG was making £0. I can tell you with certainty if they were independent and around today the growth would be stalling and there is a high chance they would not be able to continue raising venture money, it is very easy to grow products to 1bn users when you add FB growth's team which is best in class to an already solid product.
Twitter has been generating solid revenue from around 2009/10 (someone correct me if im off here) and big brands love it and there is lots of data I have seen to support the value to advertisers around the world.
Twitter does however need to tell its story a lot better afterall a Tweet means many different things to many people, its just not as easy to communicate as Facebook to an outside but this doesn't mean it is not valuable or should not exist independently.
> 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful?
It's not successful because their expenses are $2.6 billion a year which exceeds the revenue of $2.2 billion collected.[1]
This means they lost $450 million. They have no profits. They've never had a profitable year. In short, if you spend more than you make, you're not financially successful.
Why do many people think companies like Twitter and Spotify (also $2 billion revenue and still losing money) are "successful" ?!? I'm guessing the confusion happens because observers don't understand the difference between revenue and profit.
Is there a breakdown somewhere of where those costs are coming from and what they can probably knock out to hit profitable? It's only a few, hundred million over revenue. I mean, that's a big problem but I've seen rebounds from worse when better management came along.
1/ Im an advertiser I can tell you that big brands still love the platform (and spend heavily) 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful? 3/ Balance sheet has $1bn+ 4/ NFL deal is huge, ditto bloomberg streaming 5/ Product needs to ship much quicker than Facebook does to stay relevant 6/ It is the only place that has nailed real time properly, if there is a bomb in a major city you will hear it first on twitter no where else has this edge, nowhere 7/ The worlds most important people are on this platform and readily accessible in most cases, not true on FB in terms of accessibility 8/ 80% Gross Margin business 9/ Needs to stay independent and ramp up advertising spend once logged out tweets ad product rolls out 10/ True reach of Twitter is almost 1bn users when we consider tweets appearing on TV, off the platform, in newspapers etc. This is comparable to FB
Some of the ignorant stuff people are saying about all the employees is disrespectful.
WhatsApp and IG when they were acquired were making very little money, if they had stayed independent and no one acquired them they would not be running today (they would exhaust the capital chain). WhatsApp maybe was making £10ml a year but was losing money; IG was making £0. I can tell you with certainty if they were independent and around today the growth would be stalling and there is a high chance they would not be able to continue raising venture money, it is very easy to grow products to 1bn users when you add FB growth's team which is best in class to an already solid product.
Twitter has been generating solid revenue from around 2009/10 (someone correct me if im off here) and big brands love it and there is lots of data I have seen to support the value to advertisers around the world.
Twitter does however need to tell its story a lot better afterall a Tweet means many different things to many people, its just not as easy to communicate as Facebook to an outside but this doesn't mean it is not valuable or should not exist independently.