I remember back in 2008 when Twitter became such a huge craze in my secondary school. When my friend mentioned about how she argued with another classmate about me the night before, I was definitely intrigued but did not press further because I viewed Twitter as a fad. In spite of that, I still created my own Twitter account but was hardly active. It was only years later when I realized that Twitter actually has its own usefulness like knowing what are the trending topics at any point of time which allows me to be updated with current affairs.
This was how the Twitter icon looked like when it first started.
So, how did Twitter begin?
Twitter was founded by this group of men working in a podcasting company called Odeo on March 2006 and they are Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass. Formerly, Twitter was called 'twttr' as part of a popular trend to drop the vowels of companies and services. However, Twitter didn't instantly gain popularity. In fact, Odeo's business was even killed and went through a buyback. It was only in 2007 when Twitter finally exploded with more than 60 thousand Tweets being posted per day at the 2007 South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference.
The above picture shows how Twitter gained popularity over time. I find it amazing how quickly Twitter went viral after gaining traction at the SXSW Interactive conference.
The picture above shows the Twitter statistics in 2015. I bet you are as impressed as I am after seeing these statistics but...is Twitter actually doing well?
Believe it or not...it isn't..
Trust me, I was just baffled as you all are. But it's indeed true.
According to this article, Twitter had already accrued more than $400 million in losses and apparently it has lost more than $2 billion in total since launching a decade ago. To make matters worse, it seems that Twitter is predicted to lose even more, as much as $748.2 million.
So what is the problem here?
It seems that the problem lies with Twitter's subscriber growth. In the last quarter, its user base only grew by only 1.3%.
Even though the user base in Twitter comprises of around 300 million users, it is not the number of users itself that is the problem. It is the fact that the numbers are not growing fast enough to justify what the premium investors are paying. And not only that, 300 million users just pales in comparison to Facebook's 1.5 billion.
What Twitter has to fix and improve is its ad model. Apparently, it has not been able to target users in quite a laser-like manner as Facebook.
However, it seems that Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has returned (I didn't know he left) and people are optimistic for a turnaround with his return.
I know next to nothing about businesses and how they work. From Twitter's example, it seems that even enormous statistics are not enough to gain profits and I view Twitter as a social media giant. Truthfully, I was saddened knowing that Twitter has been in such predicament for years since its launch.
Well, hopefully, Twitter can start to improve on its statistics, business-wise.
I hope you guys are enlightened by my post for Week 3's topic!
See you next post!
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