This interesting article on NYmag.com confirms this feeling i’m already having for a while now. Twitter needs to raise $8 billion but the income projections for 2011 are well below $200 million.
Seems to be an impossible goal. Especially now their growth is flattening at an active user base of only 50 million users. While roughly 50 percent of the tweets came from just 20,000 users.
At the same time Twitter is struggling to ‘surface the content’ and developing ways to add advertising without alienating their current users. And, on top of that, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook have more users, advertisers and developing power.
Is this the end of twitter? Not necessarily, 50.000.000 users still is a lot!
I think the biggest challenge for Twitter will be to add advertising without getting spammy. Users are accepting the ads on the right side of their Facebook, Linkedin and Google pages without problems, but will they at twitter? I say Twitter has waited too long. Their aim to add those ads very discrete (-> promoted) is great, but will not work. Why?
If you can make enough revenue with such discrete advertisements, TV, Youtube, Spotify and other platforms would do the same, instead of being so annoying. Nobody likes advertisements (well, nobody likes to be made seeing or hearing advertisements) so there is only one reason they are: it is needed to make enough money to keep the free service running.
And even if… they will need a rescue plan for the $8 billion dollar. This might be something for us, the tax-payers of this world. We are paying for funds to save governments, banks, so why not save twitter?
Full article: http://nymag.com/news/media/twitter-2011-10/index1.html
dirkvoorhoeve 
Posted on 21 October 2011
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