Jack in black: 12 years on, Twitter finally makes a profit from its firehose of memes and misery After 11 years and seven months in operation, and billions and billions of dollars in losses, Twitter today said it is, at long last, a profitable business. The shoutfest broker of memes, sarcasm, news, jokes, harassment, Russian trolls, and so so much wailing, declared it had, for the first time ever, managed to make money in …
When announcing a company "finally making a profit", I think it should be compulsory to tell us where that money's coming from.
I certainly don't pay Twitter anything.
Looking at my Twitter account, I see a tiny advert for Belvita biscuits, disguised as a twitter post, which I wouldn't click on in a billion years. That ad is a 1 minute streamed video which must take some production and backend infrastructure to serve to millions of users. Are Belvita really paying that much?
And I can scroll down for years, post tweets, view others, etc. without seeing many further ads (certainly no more than one tiny one a page, but like I say... I can scroll forever and zip between many pages without seeing anything else).
So... where are these mysterious millions/billions coming from? Who's paying that much to encourage me to buy a breakfast biscuit that I probably couldn't buy online without going to Tesco's or similar anyway?
It's no surprise that they are just haemorrhaging money.
I wonder that too. I don't use Twitter all that much, but I probably see one ad per "session" which I just scroll past. I'm more of a lurker, so maybe it depends on how you use Twitter?
If you're one on these people who have posted something like 80k Tweets, then maybe Twitter has more keywords to go on, and then as a result you get served more ads? Who knows.
I think most us techie types are cynics and we don't click on everything in sight that pops up on the web. But I know a lot of people who read every ad on FB, Twatter, etc. I know because they tell me in great detail about these "marvelous products" that are recommended by "friend" on FB and Twatter.
After 10 years or so of promoting this US corp across all BBC TV and radio and web has finally paid off. I'm sure all UK Licence fee payers very happy to see this US corp Twitter finally making a profit - now will the BBC switch it's attention and start promoting a different US corp?
As a licence fee payer I demand to know!
Journalists absolutely love Twitter. Because it makes their job so much easier. Also, to a lesser extent, Facebook. They talk about it all the time, because they use it all the time.
It's the same reason why journalists are always obsessed by what other journalists are saying/doing - and why media stories (particularly about the Beeb) are always such massive news.
A business no longer needs to be quickly profitable, just through enough money at it until it one day it magically is. For reasons.
Think about that the next time you contemplate starting your own. This is what you are up against. Not some one else's better business plan or product, but a bottomless war chest that can make bollocks profitable.
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