February 9, 2017

"Twitter Posts 10th Straight Quarter of Lower Revenue."

The Wall Street Journal reports.

But I was just looking at Twitter and seeing so many ads that I said out loud: I shouldn't even go to Twitter. I should just bookmark the Twitter page of people I actually want to read. I hate looking at my Twitter feed and running into an ad that looks like another tweet, and I have to look closely to figure out it's not something I'm following and can unfollow.

I'm seeing things like this...



... which reminds me: There are too many pictures. Why do I need to see a graphic of the Wisconsin state capitol every time Madison.com tweets me another pointless update?

45 comments:

Chuck said...

Does anything good ever happen on Twitter?

Bob Ellison said...

Don't worry. It'll be dead soon.

traditionalguy said...

Is this a cafe? Nope, there are no pictures.

10 quarters are 2 1/2 games. They must be in Sudden Death Overtime.

Lewis Wetzel said...

People don't need twitter. The world wouldn't change if it disappeared. Ditto for Facebook. Zuckerberg probably has nightmares about all the Facebook users realizing that it is a waste of time.

Michael K said...

I've not regretted avoiding Twitter.

Facebook is for children's pictures and a few groups like the B52 fans, etc,.

Basset hounds, too.

Wilbur said...

There are a lot of websites I abandoned simply because the proliferation of popup ads made them unpleasant to navigate, e.g., National Review and The Washington Times.

madAsHell said...

Where will Trump tweet when twitter fails?

Greg said...

These ads only appear on the website. The odd time I look at twitter on the website instead of a 3rd party phone app I make a point of blocking the company with the ad. Hopefully they monitor that and will stop wasting their money. I won't miss it when it's gone.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Why do I need to see a graphic of the Wisconsin state capitol every time Madison.com tweets me another pointless update?

Meade's video of Althouse doing her Howard Beale impersonation is due any day now!

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

The main point of Althouse's post, as I understand things, is that thoughtful blog posts, such as this post on the limited consequences of Roe v Wade being overturned, will remain an important fixture of the webiverse.

Nonapod said...

Twitter has certainly seems to have devolved into a cesspit of idiotic ads, idiotic arguments, idiotic self promotion, and idiotic pointless one-upmanship. Maybe it's always been that to some extend, but it seems more so day by day. I'm guessing in the first few years of Twitters existence, the crap to quality ratio was something like 50/50, in 2017 it seems more like 95/5.

Bob Ellison said...

Thanks for armsplaining.

Kevin said...

"Why do I need to see a graphic of the Wisconsin state capitol every time Madison.com tweets me another pointless update?"

It's not even the entire capitol, just the dome. Each Tweet another phallic reminder of the patriarchy that continues to oppress the sisterhood.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

YoungHegelian said...

A major structural issue with the entire "Second Wave" of Silicon Valley-ish start-ups is that their sources of revenue are paper thin.

Twitter, Google, Facebook -- they're all based on advertising revenue. Google is trying desperately to get into something that'll bring in more sources of cash, but they ain't there yet. In the meantime, there's only so much advertising that companies want to buy.

Amazon is basically Sears & Roebuck, except online. It took Amazon forever to finally start posting profit, but, under pressure from shareholders, they finally did. Even so, their primary business of selling anything & everything is barely turning a profit. Amazon's biggest money maker? Its AWS computer cloud services that it rents to companies for must-be-up-all-the-time web sites & line of business apps. AWS was 5% of Amazon's gross in 2015, but 40% of its profit!

Compare this to the old guard SV companies -- HP, Sun, Oracle, Adobe, & even though it's in Washington state, let's throw in Microsoft. These are the companies you turned to run your business on. You bought Oracle to develop your own Line-of-Business app. You ran it on a Sun or HP server. Your staff wrote memos & emailed each other with Microsoft apps. These companies were at the very core of your internal business processes. The new guys? Advertising or consumer-driven. Big difference in what a company will shell out big bucks for.

fivewheels said...

In her writing on this blog, it seems to me that unless Althouse is writing about events she remembers from the '60s, you don't get much of a sense of her age, or feel like she's "old." Except for just now.

(Not meant as criticism.)

fivewheels said...

Twitter is still good for @dog_rates and @nihilist_arbys

Bob Ellison said...

YoungHegelian, that's an apt comparison of then and now.

But some companies, like FaceBook, Amazon, and Google, have such incredible market capitalizations and high P/E ratios that they can trade their own play-money for other people's dashed dreams or failed enterprises with otherwise good potential. Remember when AOL bought Time-Warner?

Apple is an outlier. They make great hardware and usually mediocre software, but they have ridden the trends rather well over the years, and now sit on a mountain of cash, much of it from high profit margins on hardware. [BTW, I have lots of Apple products but am too scared to invest in it.]

Lewis Wetzel said...

Facebook is, essentially, a group blog with a database back end. You can share family pictures via a personal blog. Hell, you could build a group blog for your friends and family pretty easily. Facebook is not a web technology company, it is an advertising company.

Todd said...

I dumped twitter (not that I was a HUGE twitter user) and switched to gab.ai where free speech is (expected to be) protected.

I say it that way as the service is new and will likely, one day disappoint me like twitter and FB have but for now, it appears to be better.

We shall see...

Anonymous said...

"Twitter tells you random strangers are obnoxious assholes, FB tells you your friends & family are." --Dave "Iowahawk" Burge

YoungHegelian said...

@BE,

have such incredible market capitalizations and high P/E ratios that they can trade their own play-money for other people's dashed dreams or failed enterprises with otherwise good potential

That's true, but money is just part of the equation. Alphabet/Google has big bucks & brilliant people, but they still haven't found another goose that lays golden eggs. Having a product is one thing. Having a top management team whose heart & souls are into marketing it is a whole different ballgame.

They make great hardware and usually mediocre software, but they have ridden the trends rather well over the years, and now sit on a mountain of cash, much of it from high profit margins on hardware

Apple's big bucks come not just from iPhones & laptops, but also from iTunes. Talk up some neighborhood teen-agers & see what some of them spend on iTunes every month. I think Apple passed its high-water mark last year & it'll be downhill from here. With all their cash, there's a lot ruin in that company. But, I have faith in noble social justice warrior Tim Cook's ability to fuck things up royally.

tim maguire said...

Agreed on too many pictures. I find it embarrassing to check my feed at work. Plus they take up a lot more space so I have to scroll more.

Luke Lea said...

Could one reason be they don't tweet any ads? I saw them sprinkled among the tweets when I first signed up but now never. Sheer incompetence it looks like to me.

Peter said...

"It took Amazon forever to finally start posting profit" BUT it's not that Amazon has no earnings, it's that it puts most of what it makes into expansion. Thereby producing little net profit.

Amazon could have a much higher net profit if it retained less of what it earned, but apparently its management thinks expansion is a good investment.

That makes it quite different from Twitter, whose earnings disappear into high operating costs.

stever said...

I am not a twitter person, Most of the people I would "follow" aren't worth the time. Hell its like the internet on steroids.

Add in the fact that people say lots of stupid things because they think they need to say something. Which is stupid. I don't like the idea of "tweeting" anyway.

rehajm said...

I should just bookmark the Twitter page of people I actually want to read

That's me! One or two people curate all the other stuff I might be interested in...

Wince said...

... which reminds me: There are too many pictures. Why do I need to see a graphic of the Wisconsin state capitol every time Madison.com tweets me another pointless update?

Compared to what? The hassles in trying to post comments on Althouse?

Pictures of storefronts, street signs and endlessly deleted comments?

Please, spare me your complaints.

FullMoon said...

EDH said... [hush]​[hide comment]

... which reminds me: There are too many pictures. Why do I need to see a graphic of the Wisconsin state capitol every time Madison.com tweets me another pointless update?

Compared to what? The hassles in trying to post comments on Althouse?


I get no ads on twitter, or Althouse. I ignore the "capcha" thing and have no prob commenting.Using Firefox and (free)adblock plus

Fernandinande said...

42 Stats You Should Know About Visual Content Marketing in 2017

General Visual Content Statistics

1) 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%). (Source)

2) 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%). (Source)

3) When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. (Source)

...etc...

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MadisonMan said...

The worst twitter feed cloggers are Sports Teams that tweet all through a game.

"It's First Down"

"1-Yard Gain for the Running Back"

"It's Second Down"

"It's a beautiful day here at the stadium"

"They've called a time-out"

"They're back from time-out and lined up for second down. Dropped pass"

"It's third down"

.
.
.

Ken B said...

If your plan is to cull the herd it is useful to know who the idiots are. It is simplest if they identify themselves. Hence, Twitter.

David said...

Perhaps the New York Times will buy Twitter. Seems like the perfect digital property for the times.

Marc in Eugene said...

I follow Twitter on Tweetdeck; it's fairly obvious which are the adverts and consequently fairly easy to simply omit paying them any attention. And even for me, who am not what anyone would call 'tech savvy', it's pretty simple to follow useful and thoughtful people on Twitter and not have to pay attention to nonsense-- of which there is certainly a superabundance, sure.

Won't prose on like I did the last time (mea culpa), but on Thursdays from 8 to 10 pm Eastern there are a lot of people on Twitter reading together (after a manner of speaking) St Augustine's de Civitate Dei, on the City of God. #CivDei.

rhhardin said...

I have no twitter account and just look up iowahawk's page, though he seems to have quit twitter after a scolding rant against the online world.

Curious George said...

"I hate looking at my Twitter feed and running into an ad that looks like another tweet, and I have to look closely to figure out it's not something I'm following and can unfollow."

I know exactly how you feel. Except it's not a twitter feed, it's your comment section. And it's not ads, but Chuck posts.

Unknown said...

Twitter is a nice, safe place for people like Shannon Coulter and Scott Dworkin to engage in targeted harassment. If you express agreement with a single policy of Donald Trump, they automatically make you into a hard-core Trump supporter, and your livelihood is forfeit.

Jon Ericson said...

@rhhardin

Same reading I get.

Jon Ericson said...

I hope he gets the "Head twitter post POTUS filter with absolute rewrite authoritah" position.

Jon Ericson said...

Tents fingers

Dan from Madison said...

Twitter. The best way to communicate since two cans and a string.

Known Unknown said...

Why do I need to see a graphic of the Wisconsin state capitol every time Madison.com tweets me another pointless update?

Everything within the State, nothing outside the State. Not even the weather.

damikesc said...

Well, apparently, Dorsey isn't a miracle worker and allowing SJW to run your service isn't a guarantee of improved revenue or users.

I'll go ahead and say it --- there is nothing Twitter can do to make itself terribly profitable. Few people use it regularly enough for advertisers to care. There are so many fake accounts that numbers are meaningless.

And the odds of putting anything there backfiring is far greater than the possibility of good things (think back to the useless Gawker killing McDonalds #Makeithappy campaign by tweeting "Mein Kampf" at it --- also, think back to that if you ever feel bad about Gawker dying)/.

In the SB, apparently, tons of companies didn't have any hashtags in their ads. This should be really, really disconcerting to Twitter.

damikesc said...

Sorry, it was Coke's #Makeithappy ,not McDonald's.

Jane the Actuary said...

Here's my gripe: Up until the fall, as a small-time blogger, I used to be able to tweet a link to a post and include instapundit, Ed Morrisey, Robert Stacey McCain and whatever other bloggers I thought might be willing to look at it, and get, at least every now and again, a re-tweet to their much, much larger number of twitter followers. Now they've either left or been booted off of twitter, or just don't bother retweeting others, and maybe just don't engage with twitter other than having it promote their own posts. Very disappointing.