Will Twitter Be The Second Yahoo!

For several years, Twitter’s business is not going well. Recently, the company's quotes fell again. Following them, the market value of the Twitter business fell.

The company's revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2016 amounted to $ 602 million. Although the experts forecast was calculated at $ 607 million.

Among the reasons for the decline in profits are fierce competition with Instagram and Snapchat, as well as huge advertising costs.

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

In this regard, one of the analysts asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about why he should not raise the issue of selling the company. Like, under the wing of a larger company, Twitter is more likely to get out of the crisis.

Dorsey believes that the company still has potential that will 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 the needs of users. We believe that is important. ”

The company wants to streamline the response to tweets. Now, in order for the answer to become visible to an unlimited number of people, you need to put a dot or other sign in front of the username. According to Twitter, this procedure is not always clear to new users and does not contribute to attracting an audience.

In addition, Twitter is testing the use of online broadcasting through Periscope as part of video advertising, which, according to the company, will allow advertisers to bring their product closer 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 about to give advertisers the opportunity to create their own Moments.

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

“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. According to the results of the last quarter, revenue from advertising services amounted to $ 535 million. This is 89% of all Twitter revenue. Over the year, total revenue increased by 18%, which is not a very good indicator. Last year, growth was 60%.

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



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

• Custom filters. The tool allows you to select campaigns for viewing according to the specified criteria. The following filtering options will be available to advertisers: target, status, financing tool, campaign name, placement and delivery.

• Custom metrics. This innovation will allow advertisers to choose the information that 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 feeds

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

In 5 years, the lion's share of social media content will consist of video materials, Fortune writes . Twitter’s mainstream competitor is Facebook. As soon as Facebook Live was able to broadcast for four hours, Twitter promised that 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, agrees with the media and the media that they do not publish videos in Vine and Periscope (since these are competitors' services), but use Facebook Live and Instagram. Facebook pays them $ 50 million or more for this “devotion”.

Stickers on the photo

Twitter is not a pioneer in this direction. This feature was previously implemented on Facebook and Snapchat. However, the company still developed its own library of stickers with icons and emojis, which users of the social network can post on their photos.
The feature is currently available in Twitter apps for iOS and Android. But in the desktop version of the service, photos with stickers can only be viewed.

At the same time, the mobile version of Twitter lacks the function of editing tweets and there is a limit of 140 characters (the last change was announced by the company, but it was not implemented).

Another "BUT"

Despite the fact that the company as a whole does not give up and continues to move somewhere, key employees are still leaving it. Probably, the question of exactly where the company is heading has remained unresolved for them.

Yesterday, August 1, it became known that Natalie Carris, vice president of communications, is leaving Twitter. Natalie began working in the company in February 2016. She used to be an Apple employee.



According to experts Re / code, investors will be upset by this news. They are more and more inclined to believe 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. So far, Twitter management has not been able to convince investors and retired employees.

This year, Twitter has lost eight top managers. At the beginning of the year, four executives submitted their resignation at once: senior vice president of product Kevin Weil, vice president of development Alex Rotter, head of media Katie Stanton and vice president of human resources Brian Schipper.

In May, it became known about the upcoming departure of two other key executives - vice president for global business development and platform Jana Messerschmidt and vice president of commerce Nathan Hubbard.

In June, Twitter was again left without a chapter on the product, 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 increased by 26.5% - to $ 2.055 billion, compared with the first quarter, and by 186%, compared with 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 - 63% more than in the same period of 2015. Revenues from mobile advertising grew by 63% - up to $ 6.239 billion.

Also, the number of daily active Facebook users increased by 17%. In June, the figure was 1.13 billion people. Of these, 1.03 billion entered 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 has increased by 20% - up 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. The main competitor of Facebook 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. Rejected, he returned with an offer of $ 3 billion. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and here he refused. Zuckerberg returned the next day with a check of $ 4 billion. The offer was never accepted.

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Maybe someday purchase offers will be sent to Twitter. Judging by the mood of CEO Jack Dorsey, such proposals will be rejected. But there is still the opinion of the board of directors, which so far is 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 company performance leaves much to be desired is a fact.

If you hadn’t worked 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 are already born with works.

Jack dorsey