[debrice]

It's easy to forget that prior to its acquisition, Twitter was a financial catastrophe. It still could be, but Twitter seems to be working hard at becoming a profitable business. Does praising its unsustainable past and lost designs makes us some kind of spoiled brats?

[woodruffw]

Why are we reconning this? Twitter was net positive for most quarters between 2018 and 2022[1]. They were never a money printing machine like Facebook or Google, but that wasn’t their segment anyways.

The phrase is “work smart, not hard.” I’m not convinced that Twitter’s leadership is doing either, and the market for Twitter advertising appears to agree.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

[ianburrell]

2020 was disaster but that was true for lots of companies. 2021 would have been profitable except for settlement. In 2022, they started losing advertisers after offer but before sale. With moderate layoffs like other companies did, they would have been fine in 2023.

[debrice]

They were only profitable in 2018 and 2019, all the other years, they were loosing money

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

[idlewords]

Not to mention that they were clearly overstaffed, particularly at a time when there were almost no changes to the core product. All they needed to do to be extremely profitable was cut a couple of thousand employees and find a way to let power users pay for the service. In other words, a non-clown-car version of what Musk did later.

[optimalsolver]

*retconning

[zenkat]

Interesting perspective, considering ad revenue is down nearly 60% y/y.

If they are "working hard at becoming profitable", it doesn't seem to be working.