Ongoing annual losses and a lack of user growth has meant that Twitter has long been considered ‘at risk’ as an independent company. Most recently there have been several reported failed takeover bids from suitors including Salesforce and Disney.
And what is the problem exactly? Twitter has over 310 million monthly active users. For many Twitter is an extraordinary medium for learning, discussing and sharing. I’ve found it to be the one social medium I have used consistently over the years. Yes I’ve had bad times on there – awful abuse which Twitter the company did nothing about, but Sussex Police handled superbly. But these negative moments have been by far outweighed by the positives: Reading things I’d never normally see, hearing different views, meeting interesting new people and staying in touch with old friends. And above all I’ve found Twitter to be a place where politics can become more interesting. As a politician the ability to communicate (and rebut) directly was powerful. Now as a citizen and someone working in policy, being able to see politicians, analysts and journalists working in public is both fascinating and useful.
This all has value. Huge value, just perhaps not the level of monetary value the market seems to expect when they compare it with Facebook’s 1.7 billion monthly users.
And therein lies the rub. Since Twitter floated on the public markets it has been judged against juggernauts like Facebook and Google. Yes they have produced extraordinary revenue streams, which is great for their investors. But not everyone can nor should aspire to those levels of income and growth. Yet I fear Twitter has been hurting itself and its users in a doomed quest to satiate unreasonable market expectations.
Perhaps trying to beat those expectations has been why we’ve seen such a high turnover of executives at Twitter, including CEOs. But it’s unclear to me whether this is a cause or symptom of the problems. Maybe someone will get the real inside scoop one day.
Given the fact that so many of us value Twitter I’d like to suggest that the company focussed on serving our needs first and foremost. I’m genuinely worried we could lose a valuable online community so here are some thoughts I’ve jotted down on a viable way forward…
- What features would average users (like me) pay for in a ‘PRO’ level subscription account?
- Similarly, given the impact celebrities and corporates can gain from their Twitter presence, how can that be tiered into free and paid-for packages?
I think it’s essential that anyone can post and read tweets for the community that Twitter offers to keep working. So what sorts of features could reasonably be held back for paying users? Some ideas, which probably have been suggested many times over by others before, for features to restrict to paying Twitter users only:
- Analytics: Anything beyond basic numbers (how many followers, retweets etc).
- Graphics: Ability to attach more than one image or video to a tweet.
- API access: This will outrage some, but I think providing access through apps should be a feature which is either paid for by the user or the app developer.
- Archives: This already happens to some extent at corporate level, e.g. Google paid for access, but individual access to the full searchable archive and an option to auto-archive media into other services (e.g. all photos you tweet get saved in Dropbox/iCloud/whatever) could be a paid option.
- Premium status: A paying customer should get quicker support, faster verified status (if needed) and so on. I wouldn’t want a premium label (a la LinkedIn) to appear on profiles, but I would understand why if it did happen.
How much would I pay for something like this as an ordinary user? I’d guess between £12 and £20 a year. Let’s pretend that would be the only revenue source for Twitter (so forget the bigger bucks corporate accounts and advertising should attract) and model it on 5% of active monthly users signing up at the lower end of the price bracket. In the scenario Twitter would be booking £186m revenue every year. That’s $230m in US dollars. Surely enough to run a sustainable social network on, especially if you throw in the online advertising and licensing income already coming in?
Unfortunately Twitter’s cost base has ballooned from $172 million/year to an astonishing $1.94 billion/year in 2015. Gross income has not kept up so Twitter has been consistently booking a loss, though the gap is narrowing. It’s hard to see what we users are getting for the $800m/year being spent on R&D and perhaps spending on video deals for the NFL aren’t the greatest uses of cash so I’d imagine there’s room to reduce the cost base. I think on its own terms Twitter can and should be financially viable.
The question for me is this: Is it reasonable to be chasing billion dollar revenues to please Wall Street, when a perfectly sustainable business exists ‘down’ in the hundreds of millions level, rather than the billions.
We risk seeing this wonderful community being killed or seriously damaged in the search for ways to turn it into a billion dollar company, when maybe, just maybe, sustainable life was only possible lower down the mountain. That would be a crying shame.
Jason Kitcat 