[upofadown]

>Twitter cut full-year revenue guidance to $2.17 billion to $2.27 billion, from the previous range of $2.3 billion to $2.35 billion.

I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue. So I think that they have to be doing something very right. Perhaps everyone is anticipating the inevitable next hot thing a little bit too hard.

[borgia]

>I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue.

Basically a short message service? That's naive. Twitter is a marketing platform with 300m people signed up to receive marketing materials, people who also readily provide the platform with the details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on, where they are in the world, what age they are, what gender they are and more. Of course it's extremely valuable.

[lotsofmangos]

I like Stewart Lee's take on it.

"a government surveillance operation run by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation”

[tomjen3]

That is a rip of of the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

[lotsofmangos]

Is a different take on a similar joke - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XpvH-j9BHg

The idea that social networks are useful for surveillance and the joke that the users are just useful idiots, massively predates the onion sketch as well though.

[lazzlazzlazz]

> details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on

These details can only be extracted with very complex natural language processing techniques.

> where they are in the world

The vast majority of Twitter users have no structured geographic location.

> what age they are, what gender they are

Twitter doesn't even have fields to enter age and data. It's all inferred, which makes it difficult to extract accurately (if at all).

[otterley]

Twitter, like Facebook, has beacons on just about every website out there, thanks to website owners who are all too happy to make it easy for visitors to click "like" or "tweet" in the hopes of attracting attention. You don't even have to post a single Tweet for Twitter to know about what you're into.

[tobinfricke]

In other words, they missed earnings by 4.5% (comparing the means of the two ranges) when the original uncertainty range on their estimate was also 4.5%. Doesn't seem very exciting to me.

[Lorento]

Indeed. This is news if you're actively day trading Twitter shares. Otherwise it's business as usual. Now it's at 2014 prices. It's had bigger swings in both directions in the recent past.

[hayksaakian]

lots of user X advertising = profit

valuation typically comes from:

profit X magic multiplier

where your magic multiplier is functionally a premium based on twitter's future profit potential

they're a publicly traded company, and last I remember they report their earnings publicly to shareholders

according to http://www.cnbc.com/id/102573751 their earnings were

$436 million

----------------

I've noticed more and more ads on twitter: in their android widget, on their apps, on their site.

I'm constantly getting emails asking me to use a twitter ads coupon or read about new ads features.

[Animats]

Coming soon: more ads. From the article: "Under a new agreement, marketers using Google’s DoubleClick advertising service can buy Twitter’s Promoted Tweets."

Twitter is in danger of pulling a Myspace. At Myspace, revenue went down, ad density was raised to compensate, usage went down, ad density was increased to compensate, then usage crashed. For a publicly held ad-based growth company, a down quarter is a disaster. The valuation as a growth company ends and the company starts to be valued based on its operations and earnings. Twitter currently has negative earnings.

Investors are now asking why Twitter costs so much money to run. Their revenue is $1.3 billion a year, yet they're losing money. They don't pay for content, their basic product isn't that complicated, and bulk compute and network costs are declining. Something is wrong there.

[boomzilla]

Compensation. I know an engineer with 3 year experience who was offered 150K salary + 600K of stock grant over 4 years. Management get paid a lot more, obviously.

[sushid]

Is this a recent offer or an old offer with current valuation of their stock? The latter seems reasonably if the stock offer had a five-figure valuation but a recent offer of 600k in stock seems ludicrous. Are public tech companies really offering that much in compensation these days?

[swingbridge]

Keep in mind that "stock" is likely in the form of options which, with the stock price below IPO, are likely worth nothing at this point.

[testingonprod]

They can generate that much revenue because they have scale.

It's not just a short message broadcast service.....it's a short message broadcast service with 300,000,000 users.