Tag: Twitter

Twitter’s S1: How Do the Numbers Stack Up To Google and Facebook?

Twitter’s S-1 filing is now public, you can read it here. There’s no dearth of coverage, just Google News it. I’m interested in a few metrics compared to its most likely comparables, namely Google and Facebook. First, a couple tidbits from Twitter’s S-1:

* Top line growth y/y: 118%. Twitter shows financials up to Q2 2013, so through June. Growth 1H 2012 to 1H 2013 is our most recent comparison: $101.3mm in 1H ’12, to $221.4mm in 1H ’13. That’s impressive y/y topline growth of $120.1mm, or 118%.

* Implied 2013 topline: nearly $600mm, but possibly pushing $750mm. Twitter’s earned 62% of its 2012 revenue in the second half of the year. If it does the same this year, that would imply a topline revenue for 2013 of $582.4mm and a second half of around $361mm. Given Twitter took the option of filing its IPO under the JOBS Act, which allows for confidential filing for businesses under $750mm in annual revenue, one could argue that it filed because it knew it was going to have a blowout second half, which would push its FY topline over $750mm. If indeed revenues are accelerating beyond the norms set in 2012, we may see a second half revenue figure of closer to half a billion, which would be pretty spectacular.

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Who Owns The Right to Filter Your Feed?

The old Tweetdeck interface.

(image) Last week I was in Salt Lake City for the Adobe Summit, on a stage the size of a parking lot. After some opening remarks about how the world is increasingly lit with data, I brought out Adam Bain, President of Global Revenue for Twitter. (He Vined it, natch.) Five thousand or so folks in the Internet marketing and media business were in attendance, behind us was a 7,000 square foot HD screen (I kid you not). I’ve been in front of a few big crowds, but this one was enormous. You could have parked a few 787s in the space.

My point is this: Bain knew he was in front of a lot of people, including nearly 200 journalists. As we worked our way through any number of predictable but important topics – Twitter’s revenue (growing but no numbers), the acquisition of BlueFin (TV analytics and more), etc. – I asked Bain to distinguish between Twitter and its competitive set. This was a relatively politic way of asking the inevitable “What about Facebook” question. It was then that Bain uttered what I thought was the most interesting comment of the day: “[With Twitter,] there’s no algorithm between you and your feed.”

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The 140 Character Video Is Six Seconds Long

Twitter announced its integration of Vine today, and to put not too fine a point on it, the service is, in essence, a way to create a video tweet. If a text tweet = 140 characters, then a video tweet = 6 seconds. More details over at TNW, but this announcement is quite consistent with my post earlier this week: Portrait of Twitter As A Young Media Company.

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Portrait of Twitter As A Young Media Company

Last year I predicted that Twitter would become a media company. However, I focused mainly on the new “Discover” functionality, and I probably should have gone a lot further. In this piece, I intend to.

So I’ll start with this: 2013 will be the year Twitter starts to create, curate, and co-create media experiences on top of its platform. I hinted at this in my brief coverage of Twitter’s Oscar Index (see Twitter’s Makin’ Media), but allow me to put a bit more flesh on the bones.

So what might one make from the fact that your platform captures hundreds of millions of individuals declaring what’s going on at any give time? Well, let’s break down some of the signals in all that supposed noise. As I’ve written over and over and over in the past several years, Twitter presents a massive search problem/opportunity. For example, Twitter’s gotten better and better at what’s called “entity extraction” – identifying a person, place, or thing, then associating behaviors and attributes around that thing. This (among other reasons) is why its Discover feature keeps getting better and better. Another important signal is location – Twitter is increasingly focused on getting us to geolocate our tweets. A third signal is the actual person tweeting – his or her influence and interest graph. Yet another signal is time – when was the entity tweeted about?

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Twitter’s Makin’ Media

Sure, it’s a marketing ploy perfectly in line with one of Twitter’s most important advertising segments – entertainment. But Twitter’s Oscars Index is a well executed piece of media. It reminds me of the various executions FM used to do on top of Twitter, back in the day – ExecTweets with Microsoft, ATT’s Title Tweets and CupBuzz, etc. Worth checking out.

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Predictions 2013

Mssr. Nostradamus

One week into the new year, it’s again time for me take a crack at predicting what might come of this next spin around the sun, at least as it relates to the Internet ecosystem. Last year’s predictions came out pretty well, all things considered, but I took an unusual tack – I wrote long posts on each of the first six, and then shot from the hip for the last one. Those last shots were pretty hit or miss, as you might expect.

This year I’m going to try something new. Instead of trying to get everything right – which often means being practical and reining in some of my more obvious biases – I’m going to make predictions based on what I wish would happen. In other words, below are things that I hope occur this year, even if the chances of them happening may be arguably slim. In the past I’ve edited out a fair amount of this impulse, as I was aiming game the odds in my favor. But for whatever reason – perhaps because this post marks my 10th year of predictions – I feel like airing it out and seeing what happens. So here goes.

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Predictions From Last Year: How I Did (2012 Edition)

Every year around this time I do two things: First I look back at my predictions from a year ago and grade myself, then I get around to making a new set of predictions. These are often my most popular posts of the year, proving the old magazine saw that the world loves a list. So who am I to buck the trend? Let’s get cracking on seeing how my crystal ball turned out, shall we?

As you can see from my 2012 predictions roundup, I took something of a new approach to the prognostication game last year. Instead of one lengthy post with all my predictions, I actually broke them into a series of posts, seven in all. I went into detail on why I thought each forecast would prove correct (save the last one, which was a series of “shoot from the hip” predictions.)

I’ll be as brief as I can with this review – this marks the ninth time I’ve done it. Overall, I’ve had a pretty good run of it. I hope 2013 keeps pace.

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Locked and Bloated

(image Vator News) Companies get big. Companies gain market dominance. Companies slowly pivot from their original values. Companies justify those shifts with nods to shareholder value, or consistent user experience, or inconsistent implementations of their platforms by (former) partners.

It happened to Sun. To Microsoft. To Apple. To Google. It happened in the entertainment business, it’s happening in agriculture, for goodness sake.  Now it’s happening to Facebook and Twitter. (The latest example: Instagram CEO feels Twitter card removal is the correct thing…).

I don’t have any problem with any of that, it is to be expected. The services all these companies provide are great. They’re simply wonderful. And as they get big, they get public, protective, and defensive.

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Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback

Browsing Hacker News, which I’ll admit I don’t read very closely (because, well, I’m not a hacker), I saw an interesting headline: I quit Twitter for a month and it changed my thinking about mostly everything. Well, that’s going to get my attention.

I clicked through and noted the author’s name: Adam Brault. I don’t know Adam Brault (at least, not well enough to recall reading him before), but with a headline like that, I sure wanted to read the piece. It’s quite a thoughtful rumination on his snap decision to stop using Twitter for the month of November.

Some of what Brault said didn’t resonate with me, not because I disagreed, but because it’s clear he uses Twitter in a very different manner than do I. He follows people closely and feels a connection to them that I rather envy. I follow more than 1200 people, and I’ve become a bit inured to the resulting torrent.

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Tweets Belong To The User….And Words Are Complicated

(image GigaOm) Like many of you, I’ve been fascinated by the ongoing drama around Twitter over the past few months (and I’ve commented on part of it here, if you missed it). But to me, one of the most interesting aspects of Twitter’s evolution has gone mostly unnoticed: its ongoing legal battle with a Manhattan court over the legal status of tweets posted by an Occupy Wall St. protestor.

In this case, the State of New York is arguing that a tweet, once uttered, becomes essentially a public statement, stripped of any protections. The judge in the case concurs: In this Wired coverage, for example, he is quoted as writing “If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Twitter disagrees, based on its own Terms of Service, which state “what’s yours is yours – you own your Content.”

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