Twitter isn't profitable and it's pathetic.

[cpvr]

Twitter is one of the largest and most active social media sites online today, however, twitter has lost 2 billion in two years, which is pathetic.

If i ran twitter, it would be a money making machine. If they don't turn things around soon, they won't last long.

 

[Kaynil]

If i ran twitter, it would be a money making machine.

That is quite a bold a statement.

If you allow me to quote you from your linked thread in order to bring the discussion here:

If I owned twitter, I'd make the following changes:
-Install a profit sharing program for content creators that make videos and images.
-Install a feature that'll allow users to sell tweets instead of their users using other services to do this.
-Allow news companies and the government to purchase a notice all across the service for millions - per week? Per month? This depends on what the alert is about.
-Allow rappers and entertainers to stream a concert live. Yes, this will be a charged feature. So, this feature can cost an entertainer $5k-$300k for a 20min-40min set. This depends on their budget though.
-Allow users to see what their friends are tweeting about. It's hard to find tweets because of the mass volume of tweets. It's annoying sometimes. So, therefore, if you retweet or like your follower's tweets a lot, their tweets will show up first on your timeline.
-Implement social media sharing buttons for every tweet and trending topic. There's a lot of news stations that use twitter already, but they're not helping them grow at all.
-Allow content creators and company owners to post longer tweets for a set price.

It sounds to me like a lot of it is filling it with pay for premium features, which I think would risk some backslash if not done carefully. I am honestly turned off from facebook because of all the in your face "we're trying to profit from this" so I like that twitter feels a bit more on the same level.

I would definitely be happy to some of your ideas, I really think there should be some sort of separation or tab where you can choose just a limited amount of people as your VIP or priority where you can easily make the homepage display the tweets from the people you care the most. I personally would like something like the Miiverse stacks, where you see the latest post and can expand to see more of their activity. That way the news feed would only have one post per person following. It would be a nice alternative option to the chronological default.

I also would like if their software as they recognise youtube urls, image links and stuff similar to facebook, they don't count towards the character limit.


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[CM30]

Honestly, I think the real problem with Twitter is that while it's a popular site, it doesn't need the amount of financial support, staff or resources it has at the moment.

I mean, think about it. You've got a simple microblogging system where people can share updates with others they follow. That's the core concept, and the most important features are based around helping that. Either way, it could work as say, a 30-40 person company operating like a 'lifestyle business'.

But Twitter doesn't work like this.

Instead, they basically tried to turn their neat idea/service into a multi billion dollar corporate behemoth with the assumption those billions of dollars will actually start coming in the near future.

So you've got fancy HQs in capital cities, with thousands of square metres of property for the offices. Big aquisitions where smaller companies are being bought up for millions of dollars. High end luxuries in the office, like private dining/kitchen, top of the line PCs, tons of servers and resources, etc. And a workforce of 3,860 employees.

Three thousand employees. For a company that doesn't actually know how to run a sustainable business.

And that's a problem with Silicon Valley and their big startups now. They're seemingly obsessed with trying to turn every single project into a multi billion dollar operation with thousands of employees, regardless of whether the company/concept can support those employees or resources. Look at Medium as well. Same guy who founded Twitter started that company. Guess what? It's also lost a ton of money, had to lay off a huge amount of its staff and has massively overengineered a simple article hosting site into a gigantic platform packed to the gills with Javascript and backed by more resources than ever practical. It's a concept people are doing as a one man business/hobby (myself included), yet Medium needs more than 200 employees to get it running.

Either way, the issue is very simple; these businesses are not sustainable. They're not trying to be profitable first, expand later, but 'expand at all costs' and merely 'hope' the money comes in somehow.