Bloomberg:
Twitter Inc. failed to attract more monthly users in the second quarter, spooking investors looking for evidence that the company is on a sustainable long-term growth path. The shares tumbled the most in nine months, even as quarterly revenue topped analysts’ projections.
A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That number stands at 328 million monthly active users.
Twitter has 328 million users. That’s a huge audience, by most standards. If you are an investor, the desire for growth is understandable.
But if you are a Twitter user, does growth matter? Does revenue matter?
As long as Twitter makes enough money to keep paying their bills without completely bastardizing the user experience, neither should matter. The question is, how will Twitter management react to pressure from these spooked investors. Will advertising creep upwards? Will the basic mechanics change in a quest to make Twitter pay?
I hope not. Personally, I’m a fan of the existing model.
Twitter only exits as an echo chamber for captain bloviator. It should die.
I’m kind of ashamed to be using Twitter these days.
Twitter holds the opinion that some people are more equal than others. Jack is an incompetent fool, their Trust and Safety Council is a joke, and they deserve to die.
I’m not happy with the company’s cluelessness. I still use the service, but if it disappeared tomorrow I’m fairly certain something would replace it quickly.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the service shut down while Patient Orange was on a rant?
Dave Mark I’ve made your point myself, on twitter, believe it or not.
I’m a firm believer in markets, and also a firm believer that markets aren’t flawless and that their imperfections need to be understood.
Among them is this idea that a useful, mature business can never remain static, but must be compelled to grow, every quarter, every year, to provide more value to its shareholders (and more compensation to its principals).
This is a bastardization of the basic historical notion of a business as an entity that provides a (stable) service or product in exchange for reasonable compensation.
Of course innovation and progress are essential and inevitable and when these occur, they result in growth, but the need to grow even in their absence is a corrupting force that compels good businesses to essentially prostitute themselves for increased profits, attempting by any means possible to increase them even when no value is added; or even when it’s diminished. This is “the market’s” dark side.
Cheers, Glenn. Corrupting force, baked into capitalism. Sigh.
The truth is that all these problems are solvable if we could just get rid of this ridiculous idea that “the market” is some immaculate conception that should never be questioned.
Or that its guiding philosophy should be taken from an economist who provided the excuse for any level of corporate malfeasance.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/#1429535e870e
Or a writer who literally centered her philosophy on the premise that human life has no intrinsic value, only economic.
Agreed.
That link was to a Forbes piece about the origin of the “shareholder value uber alles” argument for corporate management.