Twitter's not going to go under. It just won't grow to FB/GOOG/AMZN/MSFT size (at least not under their current strategy), and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I mean, how could it possibly grow into a Google type of company? it's product is just not that valuable. it could disappear tomorrow and nobody would have to change their plans for the day.
I have a twitter account that follows 9-10 theatres (and only those) in my city created so that I could follow the newest shows and stuff, but all I got was repetitive broadcasting of the same stuff multiple times a day by all the accounts I follow, so overwhelmingly many times that the actual new stuff that I was looking for got buried somewhere in the useless flux of yesterday's news. And overall most entertainment sources on Twitter behive similarly. I just follow the RSS feeds of local theatre magazines nowadays, it's easier, period. Finding info on twitter is a needle-haystack situation and unfortunately I'm incapable of making a binary search as a human.
does any industry really depend on it? Even if you're in the entertainment industry, if Twitter disappeared you would still just go on using every other form of media that's around. TV, radio, magazines, websites, etc. There is nothing special or indispensable about Twitter. It's a totally replaceable product. In fact, it can even be replaced with nothing at all. Nobody needs it.
There isn't some natural law that states "Twitter is with $12bn." It'a valued as such in expectation of future profits. Massive future profits. If it can't sustainably materialise those profits, it loses its valuation (and some of its investors lose their shirts).
Is it really a multi-billion dollars company, though? Twitter has never made money, and it's not clear they ever will make money. A company that can't make money isn't worth more than its assets minus debt.
> Profitable companies aren't bad for shareholders
They are if the profits were greatly overestimated. Paying a billion for a dollar of profits isn't smart. Not to mention, Twitter isn't profitable. (They lose half a billion dollars a year.)
About a month ago I said I'd find Twitter a possibly reasonable buy at a third its current valuation [1]. To make that work, a lot would need to change. And Twitter's current investors would surely lose.