Will Twitter be the second “Yahoo!”

For several years, the Twitter business has not been doing well. Recently, the company's quotes have fallen again. Following them fell the market value of the Twitter business.

The company's revenue in the second quarter of the 2016 fiscal year was $ 602 million. Although the experts forecast was calculated at $ 607 million.
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Among the reasons for the decline in profits - tough competition with Instagram and Snapchat, as well as huge advertising costs.

In late July, Verizon Holding bought the long-suffering company Yahoo! For $ 5 billion. Yahoo's business has faded away, despite the efforts of company leaders. Now, some experts believe that Twitter will soon suffer the same fate.

In this regard, one analyst asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about why he shouldn’t raise the issue of selling the company. Like, under the wing of a larger company, Twitter has more chances to get out of the crisis.

Dorsey believes that the company still has the potential to allow its business to grow further. And Twitter wants to do it alone.

“We presented our plan for 2016 and are preparing a plan for 2017. We are making a product based on user needs. We believe that this is important. "

The company wants to simplify the procedure for replying to tweets. Now, in order to make the answer visible to an unlimited number of people, you need to put a full stop or another sign in front of the user name. According to Twitter, this procedure is not always clear to new users and is not conducive to attracting an audience.

In addition, Twitter is testing the use of online broadcast through Periscope as part of video advertising, which, according to the company, will allow advertisers to bring their product to the audience. It is also planned to expand the use of Twitter Moments, a product aimed at demonstrating the most interesting tweets and discussions to users. Twitter is going to give advertisers the opportunity to create their "Moments".

Despite the fact that not so long ago, Twitter introduced a new non-chronological tape, in 2016 the company plans to make a special focus on the relevance of the information, which will allow users to stay abreast of the latest developments.

“Now we are focused on what is most important, on the problems that we need to solve; and we see signs that we are on the right track. "

Twitter Ads Manager

The main income of the company is brought by advertisers. In the past quarter, revenue from advertising services amounted to $ 535 million. This is 89% of Twitter’s total revenue. For the year, total revenue increased by 18%, which is not a very good indicator. Last year, an increase of 60%.

To increase advertising profits, the company announced a number of innovations that should make it easier for advertisers to optimize campaigns. There is a major update of the Ads Manager functionality that can attract new customers.



In the coming months, service users will get access to new features:

• Custom filters. The tool will allow you to select campaigns for viewing by specified criteria. The following filtering options will be available to advertisers: goal, status, financing instrument, campaign name, location, and delivery.

• Custom metrics. This innovation will allow advertisers to choose the information they would like to see in the reports. They will be able to add metrics to statistics and exclude them at their discretion.

New functionality will be launched worldwide.

Twitter broadcast

Twitter was the first social network to buy sports broadcast rights. Now on Twitter will be shown NHL, NFL and Wimbledon. Surely, the company sees this as a promising source of income.

After 5 years, the lion's share of social networking content will consist of video, writes the publication Fortune. The main competitor of Twitter in the field of broadcasting is Facebook. As soon as Facebook Live had the opportunity to broadcast for four hours, Twitter promised Periscope would support 24-hour broadcasts.



Therefore, Twitter buys the rights to broadcast this or that content and expects that the investment will pay off with interest. Facebook, in turn, arranges for media people and the media not to publish videos in Vine and Periscope (since these are competitors' services), and to use Facebook Live and Instagram. Facebook pays them $ 50 million or more for this “dedication”.

Stickers on the photo

Twitter is not a pioneer in this direction. Previously, this feature has already been implemented in Facebook and Snapchat. However, the company still developed its library of stickers with icons and emoji that social network users can post on their photos.
Currently, the feature is available in Twitter applications for iOS and Android. But in the desktop version of the photo service with stickers you can only view.

At the same time, Twitter’s mobile version doesn’t have a tweet editing function and is limited to 140 characters (the last change was announced by the company, but it wasn’t yet implemented).

Another "BUT"

Despite the fact that, on the whole, the company does not give up and continues to move somewhere, it is still left by key employees. Probably, the question of where the company is heading is still unresolved for them.

Yesterday, August 1, it became known that Twitter leaves the vice-president of communications Nathalie Carris. Natalie started working in the company since February 2016. Previously, she was an Apple employee.



According to Re / code experts, investors will be saddened by this news. They are increasingly inclined to the fact that employees leave the company because it does not understand its purpose, does not know where it is going. Allegedly, for the same reason, the value of its shares is decreasing. While the leadership of Twitter could not convince investors and departed employees.

This year Twitter lost eight top managers. At the beginning of the year, four executives immediately resigned: Kevin Weil, Senior Vice President, Product, Alex Rotter, Vice President, Product Development, Katie Stanton, Head of Media, and Brian Schipper, Vice President, Human Resources.

In May, it became known about the upcoming departure of two more key executives - Vice President for Global Business Development and the platform Yana Messerschmidt and Vice President for Commerce Nathan Hubbard.

In June, Twitter was again left without a product chapter, and in July, Kirstin Stewart, vice president of media partnership in North America, announced her decision to leave the company.

Main competitor

Twitter’s main competitor, Facebook, has significantly improved financial results. Moreover, Facebook has significantly increased its audience.

For the second quarter of 2016, the company's net profit grew by 26.5% to $ 2.055 billion, compared with the first quarter, and by 186%, compared to the second quarter of 2015.

Facebook revenue for the second quarter of 2016 increased by 59% - to $ 6,436 billion, compared with the same period in 2015.



The company's revenue from advertising in the second quarter amounted to $ 6,239 billion - a 63% increase over the same period in 2015. Revenues from mobile advertising grew by 63% - to $ 6,239 billion.

Also, the number of daily active Facebook users has increased by 17%. In June, the figure was 1.13 billion people. Of these, 1.03 billion went to the social network from mobile devices.

The average number of active users per month increased by 15% to 1.71 billion users. As of June 30, 2016, the number of Facebook mobile users increased by 20% to 1.57 billion people.

But the largest social network has its own “fears”. Snapchat is the second most popular social network in the world. Facebook's main competitor is a more flexible company and is significantly inferior in size. This allows Snapchat to grow faster and always be on the crest of a wave.

Mark Zuckerberg wanted to buy Snapchat for a billion dollars. Having been refused, he returned with a proposal of $ 3 billion. CEO Snapchat Evan Spiegel, and then he refused. Zuckerberg returned the next day with a check of $ 4 billion. The proposal was never accepted.

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Perhaps someday purchase offers will be sent to Twitter. Judging by the mood of CEO Jack Dorsey, such proposals will be rejected. But there is also the opinion of the board of directors, which is still in solidarity with the opinion of Dorsey. At least he says so.

Whether Twitter will become the second Yahoo, is not yet known. But the fact that the company's performance leaves much to be desired is a fact.

If you didn’t work on Twitter and Square, what would you do?

I like to create tools, so I would work on tools that allow people to create something more than themselves. I wonder how the brain works, and I think that we are creating artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to better understand how what we were born with is working.

Jack Dorsey