Sorry for all the typos. I got called away and saved, and missed the edit window.
…many of the big-money Youtube content providers are exclusive, especially the streamers. They get paid to stick to the one platform. Others are locked into Twitch.
The smaller content creators that tend to simulpost to multiple locations wouldn’t bring in a lot of eyeballs because (wait for it) there are multiple ways people can already see their content.
And this is where Twitter as a video platform runs into problems. Its expensive to run a video hosting platform. The virtual graveyard of failed video/streaming platforms is big.
Youtube and Vimeo and Twitch all have clear and distinct “personalities” and have clear and distinct target markets.
Twitter doesn’t have any of that when it comes to video. There is no reason why any of the big-name content creators should move over unless Elon opens up the checkbook. And even then there is no guarantee the audience will follow.
With all due respect Sam, but this is a monumentally stupid idea.
It’s something that is only possible if you don’t give a fuck about spending billions of dollars of other peoples money.
Why would the New York Times waste any time while Twitter “fails, learns why, refactors then tries again?” They don’t have any desire to be part of a glorified beta-test. The New York Times doesn’t care about Twitter’s processes here. They only care about the results. And if Twitters processes mean that they haven’t done the leg-work to demonstrate that the product or service is viable, then they have no reason to want to buy in.
This isn’t a business. This isn’t how business works. This is a monkey flinging its poo against the wall, sniffing it, then deciding to eat it.
We all know how its supposed to work. That isn’t the question. The question is will this make money? That’s all the New York Times will care about. It needs to be more than just a trickle of cash. The margins need to be big enough to justify the New York Times upending the current business model. Just because Elon Musk is irresponsible and can afford to lose millions of other-people’s-money on a gamble doesn’t mean that everybody else is.
No, paywalls aren’t doing great. But its Elon Musk’s job to convince people that “micropayments are more profitable than the paywall subscriptions.” This is essential. This isn’t “Field of Dreams.” If you build it, they won’t simply come.
There are no short-cuts here. You just have to do the work.
It was a pilot. It hadn’t launched. They were doing the work to make sure that when it did launch, they had the best chance for success. That means testing on a small audience, that means convincing thousands of retailers that the idea was viable.
They were doing the work. And they kept doing it right up until the moment they were kicked to the curb.
Incorrect.
Twitter, as a platform, was stable.
That stability (and in turn, confidence in the platform) went away when Elon Musk took over and fired a large proportion of the staff.
“Time” isn’t going to fix the fact that an advertiser has nobody to call because all of the Key Account Managers they used to deal with all got fired. Only more staff is going to fix that.
What Twitter is facing right now is all entirely self-inflicted.
…if I didn’t have a spellcheck extension installed on my browser, every single post would be a disaster! I’d be lost without it.
Much as I dislike Musk, I truly doubt this is how he builds rockets. His designer know the science, they know the engineering, they do the math. Yeah, rockets are rocket science, and things don’t work so you fix them. And he is more aggressive than NASA, which is good. But they don’t throw together a bunch of components and hope it works.
You seem to be proposing that they open up a high profit restaurant on the Titanic as it sinks. Not a good idea. Even if the restaurant would work.
This is how I get the newspaper I want, in particular, the much more expensive The Economist (it’s a magazine but they call it a newspaper). I get free access to it electronically every week (I also get the New Yorker this way). I do pay for the NYT and a local newspaper, but beyond that, I don’t really need to digest more news.
I love my library resources and suggest you check them out. It’s very easy to get access to these items and e-books & audiobooks via whatever device you own. I wouldn’t be interested in paying Twitter for them.
The biggest problem with all of this is that Musk is destroying the Twitter brand. Nobody is flocking to Parler, Truth Social, or 4chan to set up shop because people don’t want to be associated with them. For Musk to succeed with Twitter then he needs people to be comfortable associating with the brand, I certainly won’t be posting my music on Twitter (although this is in part because Instagram (ugh) and Tik Tok (double ugh) are better for that).
The other thing to keep in mind is that Twitter is small potatoes relative to the truly massive social media companies (#15 as of the last list I saw) being only slightly ahead of Reddit. They don’t have the market clout to bully the industry. Also, it means they don’t have a lot of room to move without fading into irrelevance. There is a level of traffic below which it becomes very hard to gain momentum.
Surely the Lusitania is a better analogy for Twitter right now.
2 Stars. The food was good, but the deck chairs could have used some rearranging, the band just kept playing, and the ambiance was a bit more panicky than I like.
Would not recommend, will not return.
Why do you think so? The Lusitania was sunk as an act of war by a belligerent. The Titanic sank due, in large part, to hubris. IMHO, I’d say the Titanic is a more apt analogy.
I would say that Elon deliberately torpedoed Twitter. Though, you’re right - I wasn’t a deliberate act of war. Korean flight 007 would be a better comparison, but then the resturant analogy completely breaks down.
I’ll accept “Maus has no idea what he’s talking about” as a possible solution.
I don’t think so. I think that he was so full of himself that he thought that anything he touched would just turn to gold, that twitter was just waiting for his leadership to flourish under.
IOW, hubris. And what does hubris traditionally come right before? The ancient Greeks would have had a field day making a morality play of “Twitter and the Musk”.
Do recall that it wasn’t more than a few months ago that he was trying to back out of the deal and had to be sued into following through with it. At that time, at least, this was not the way he wanted things to go.
“Musk and Twitter on the Internet.”
Captain Smith of the Titanic ran it into the iceberg through negligent amounts of inattention to existing risks. Maybe an even better metaphor is Captain Schettino of the Costa Condordia who crashed his ship into the rocks while showing off his knowledge of local navigation by eyeball.
Now your Lusitania metaphor totally works if we start from the assumption that Musk bought it to sink it. Not that he bought it to operate it then recklessly sank it instead.
That interpretation sees Musk as an outside enemy who wanted to sink Twitter and accomplished that by sneaking aboard and blowing holes in the hull from the inside. Which is probably close enough to what Kapitänleutnant Schwieger did to the Lusitania: sink it by blowing holes in the hull from the outside. In either case the good ship Lusitania-Twitter goes down by the bow.
Maybe a better captain would be Wrong Way Peachfuzz
Musk does seem to be leading the ship in all directions at once.
Or as the title of a Clint Eastwood movie almost had it: Every Which Way But Up.
Maybe Captain Hazelwood and the bridge crew of the Exxon Valdez?
There was plenty of blame to go around on that one from the corporate offices all the way down.
Or Stephen Leacock (IIRC) who said: Lord Ronald mounted his horse and rode off in all directions.
I think that is “Every Which Way But Loose.” With the orangutan. I’ll leave others to tie that to Musk.
Yes, that was the movie I meant. A fun movie about a not real bright bareknuckle brawler, his low-life Mom, and an orangutan. And the hapless goons they go up against. Musk could play several roles in that one.
Left turn, Clyde! Right tun, Clyde!