Saturday, May 09, 2015

What Future For A Non Profitable Twitter

You know that my love story with Twitter is complicated. I have been an early adopter (back in 2007), I am using a lot the service, and I am a real fan of it. It is obviously one of the most useful social media of the moment. And obviously, I believe that it changed the life of a lot of people.

But if you read me on this blog, you know I have been questionning a lot the business modell. I still find hard to believe how Twitter will be a cash machine someday. Still, the number of people using the service is growing, and it seems that the usage is so great it must have a future.

  • 302 million users (+18%)
  • 80% of users connect via mobile
  • $436 millions in revenues (1,44 €/users)
  • $200 million in R&D
  • $-162 millions in loss
The stock price fell by 18%...
Just to explain more about the last figure. Losing $160 means: 
  • 37% of the sales
  • Losing 53 cents per users (I want my 53 cents!)
I don't know that many companies that can hold such figures.Now obviously Twitter has a real meaning and a reason to live on. As previously the telegram, the phone and/or the television, it costed a lot of money to develop those media. Actually I would like to have the annual report of the ABC or the AT&T of their early days, to see how it looked like.

Let's see the sunny side; Revenues are still growing, and faster than the number of users, which means that they are doing a good job on monetization.

What Twitter really needs to do is to be able to lift its revenues per users, in order to reach some standards which are similar to the TV business or the newspaper business.