[sandworm101]

Lurkers are also the most important people. They consume the content. They are the meat of the business, the ones that respond to advertising and political messaging. If I were twitter I would champion all the lurker accounts, all the eyeballs to which twitter serves content. Nobody ever faulted the Nielson ratings scheme for "lurker" viewers who only watched but didn't themselves create television shows.

[JauntTrooper]

Definitely agree. I joined Twitter four months ago. I haven't tweeted yet, but I'm reading it daily on the app and occasionally liking tweets.

I've been so surprised at how effective the advertising has been on me. I've never experienced this level of engagement with online marketing. Ads for TV shows, movies, live shows, musicians and comedians have been particularly effective.

I've found myself following a lot of show writers I've never heard of, and I even signed up for some new streaming services because of it. Google and Facebook ads never felt like they impacted me, though I know how important and dominant they are to business marketers. I've never clicked on a banner ad and my eyes glaze over sponsored links. Twitter's level of engagement with their marketing content is new to me, and I'm impressed.

[sandworm101]

I actively work to block or prevent ad tracking. When youtube serves me an ad for retirement planning or feminine hygiene products, that is my little victory. That is me successfully preventing them from knowing enough about me to target ads.

[r00fus]

Furthermore, there are the non-tweeting active users (ones who like only) and the ones who RT a lot but don't create organic tweets.

Those are indeed incredibly valuable. Engaged audience = your real audience.

[candiddevmike]

Unlike passive media consumption though, Twitter needs users to submit content (tweets, replies) to give lurkers something to do.

[jeromegv]

Yes and no, just like any major media platform, huge majority of tweets being seen are from a very small group of influencers/popular person. That's why when you join twitter, it suggests to you a lot of people to follow that are already big.

[brabel]

There's only a yes in your answer.

[FalconSensei]

No. You can have only 10% of accounts actively tweeting and the rest just consuming what those post. All those - active and not - are monetizable

[Hamuko]

You don't really need that many people to submit content though. I imagine most YouTube users have never uploaded a single video, and they don't need to, since there's basically no end to available content there.

[devmor]

Twitter specifically added the annoying feature of your likes being shown to your followers so that lurkers would be actively contributing to the algorithm though.

As long as lurkers are "liking" content, their local network will see an engagement increase.

[remram]

This is a second-order objective though. The goal is to show ads to humans on the platform. Having a lot of human authors (or any kind of content authors) generating content is a way to achieve the goal, not a goal in itself.

There are other ways to achieve the goal, such as making ads more relevant (targeted advertising), having users consume more of the same content (recommendation), having the same content take longer to consume (periscope). Growing the number of human posters is definitely not a requirement.

[raydev]

The people who create content do it in such massive amounts that this never seems to be an issue.