A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
Please do NOT talk that way about Leon's bar stool companion down at the Do Drop Inn in Burnout, Alabama.
Wallace now looks the best bet to me if Boris goes
I think Truss is much more likely than Wallace. She has the necessary chutzpah.
Truss net rating with the public -7%, Wallace net rating +2% now. Wallace is the only Cabinet Minister with a higher net rating than Starmer's -1%. He could be John Major 2.
Is there a war bounce element to Wally’s ratings though? Whilst others, especially Sunak, have had to deliver bad news, every time I see or hear of Wally he is getting a thumbs up from me for helping Ukraine and dissing Putin.
Does he have the skill set to be a great front man, or just the solid deputy to someone else? The great danger in this situation is some candidates are beginning to look good simply through being an unknown quantity not taking the brickbats in the front line. In terms of the skill set to carry off fronting the band, despite everything, that person is still Boris - the silver tongued cad, who’d charm you into bed and then disappear, still sounds persuasive, only the difference now is the knowledge of him as the scoundrel, rather than the honest guy.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens. We saw the twitter boycott by football clubs and journalists last year that happened on the weekend of the super league story. And a few journalists couldn’t resist breaking their own boycott to say something.
It’s possible that enough people leave it, but I’m inclined to think that it has too much inertia with so many companies and organisations having a presence.
It’s unlikely to happen. Right wingers have threatened to decamp and go to Gab or Parler or GETTR. None of which has really established itself and the least said about Menshn the better.
Can we at least agree that social media companies have stupid names?
Definitely.
Any company who insists on dropping the vowels out of their name I them on the moron list....
Wallace now looks the best bet to me if Boris goes
I think Truss is much more likely than Wallace. She has the necessary chutzpah.
Truss net rating with the public -7%, Wallace net rating +2% now. Wallace is the only Cabinet Minister with a higher net rating than Starmer's -1%. He could be John Major 2.
Just looked at that helpful YouGov data. Only 37% have heard of Wallace. Of those 37%, 11% like him, 9% dislike him, and 17% are neutral. Hardly a ringing endorsement. Major was much better known, I think.
If your lot go for Wallace, there's a lot of recognition work to do. Which is why I suspect he won't make the running.
He has been a competent Defence Secretary and of those who have seen him and noticed him they tend to like him.
He is the anti Boris, not a celebrity, dull but decent and competent and law abiding. If Boris is forced out over partygate, Wallace is in my view the ideal successor
So, if you're right, at the next GE we could have an epic battle. Dull, decent, competent and law abiding vs. dull, decent, competent and law abiding.
Yes, although it would be the dullest 2 main party leaders since Heath and Wilson and at least Wilson had a bit of charisma and the charismatic albeit flawed Thorpe was a contender too. Ed Davey is also pretty dull.
Makes a change from Johnson v Corbyn though which was perhaps a bit too much charisma and populism
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens. We saw the twitter boycott by football clubs and journalists last year that happened on the weekend of the super league story. And a few journalists couldn’t resist breaking their own boycott to say something.
It’s possible that enough people leave it, but I’m inclined to think that it has too much inertia with so many companies and organisations having a presence.
It’s unlikely to happen. Right wingers have threatened to decamp and go to Gab or Parler or GETTR. None of which has really established itself and the least said about Menshn the better.
Can we at least agree that social media companies have stupid names?
Definitely.
Any company who insists on dropping the vowels out of their name I them on the moron list....
Wallace now looks the best bet to me if Boris goes
I think Truss is much more likely than Wallace. She has the necessary chutzpah.
Truss net rating with the public -7%, Wallace net rating +2% now. Wallace is the only Cabinet Minister with a higher net rating than Starmer's -1%. He could be John Major 2.
Just looked at that helpful YouGov data. Only 37% have heard of Wallace. Of those 37%, 11% like him, 9% dislike him, and 17% are neutral. Hardly a ringing endorsement. Major was much better known, I think.
If your lot go for Wallace, there's a lot of recognition work to do. Which is why I suspect he won't make the running.
He has been a competent Defence Secretary and of those who have seen him and noticed him they tend to like him.
He is the anti Boris, not a celebrity, dull but decent and competent and law abiding. If Boris is forced out over partygate, Wallace is in my view the ideal successor
And to think that Rishi could have been PM by now. I wonder what that would have done for his and his party’s ratings?
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
I’m not sure it’s cheap, it feels like a calculated gamble from Musk. But it is calculated. Twitter is probably the most important social medium in the western world (for political influence)
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
Indianapolis used to have some of the finest thrift stores in the US. Not sure of situation now, or if you wish to spend you time rummaging for a cheap coat or bric-a-brac?
Interesting vid was posted on YouTube this week, check out the Indy Canal Walk . . , here AND on the ground.
He has been a competent Defence Secretary and of those who have seen him and noticed him they tend to like him.
He is the anti Boris, not a celebrity, dull but decent and competent and law abiding. If Boris is forced out over partygate, Wallace is in my view the ideal successor
Traditionally, the successor to a sitting Prime Minister comes from the three other top offices of State.
Eden, MacMillan, Douglas-Hume, Callaghan, Major, Brown and May were all either Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary when taking over from a Prime Minister outside an election.
I fully accept Johnson was none of these though he had been May's Foreign Secretary.
I struggle with Wallace going straight to the top job from the second tier of Cabinet but you know the Conservative membership far better than most of us. The problem is the membership only matters once the parliamentary party have had their say and whittled the field down to a final two. IF Wallace makes it to the last two, he could emulate Iain Duncan-Smith who was Defence Secretary (albeit in a Shadow capacity) when succeeding William Hague (and in the process defeating the Shadow Chancellor - the Shadow FS and Shadow HS didn't stand).
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He wanted to own the libs.
$44BN to own the libs. Hope it’s worth it.
As recently as 2020 he was 'only' worth less than $40bn according to wiki. Not sure what the tipping point was which caused his wealth to shoot up 4x in a year.
Probably the value of Tesla stock as it’s done pretty well since 2020.
Yes, but what drove the sudden rise?
$5bn operating profit last quarter and a dizzying growth rate. People don't buy EVs, they buy Teslas. Case in point, now that our move to Switzerland is close to being canned (praise be to whoever or whatever higher power convinced my wife) we've begun looking for a car, the Model X is at the top of the shopping list.
When my Fiesta got rescued from the end of a Highland landrover track after being slightly on fire, the man who picked me up desperately urged me never to buy a Tesla.
He seemed to make most of his living picking them up from the NC500.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
I’m not sure it’s cheap, it feels like a calculated gamble from Musk. But it is calculated. Twitter is probably the most important social medium in the western world (for political influence)
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
He has been a competent Defence Secretary and of those who have seen him and noticed him they tend to like him.
He is the anti Boris, not a celebrity, dull but decent and competent and law abiding. If Boris is forced out over partygate, Wallace is in my view the ideal successor
Traditionally, the successor to a sitting Prime Minister comes from the three other top offices of State.
Eden, MacMillan, Douglas-Hume, Callaghan, Major, Brown and May were all either Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary when taking over from a Prime Minister outside an election.
I fully accept Johnson was none of these though he had been May's Foreign Secretary.
I struggle with Wallace going straight to the top job from the second tier of Cabinet but you know the Conservative membership far better than most of us. The problem is the membership only matters once the parliamentary party have had their say and whittled the field down to a final two. IF Wallace makes it to the last two, he could emulate Iain Duncan-Smith who was Defence Secretary (albeit in a Shadow capacity) when succeeding William Hague (and in the process defeating the Shadow Chancellor - the Shadow FS and Shadow HS didn't stand).
Back then the Great Offices hadn't been deliberately populated with lightweights, sadists and criminals.
Terrible decision, pitching outside leg and still given out
Nasty. Still, plenty more games to come. One of our sides openers, and winner of the batting trophy most years, had his arm broken on Saturday by a full bunger (Beamer). Not a great start to the year...
“But as yet there is no vacancy.” On topic. Asking Mike. As a wise old head of following politics, are you not getting a sort of whiff of something though? Only just over the last week or so, you know now when it started but didn’t know at the time it started.
Just a flurry of stories, each on their own not remarkable, firstly as TSE expertly put it, a PM with majority of 80 didn’t fight the new parliamentary enquiry into Partygate, and then the rumours of dropping many plans announced in current Queens Speech more than a few don’t even seem that controversial to me to whip. Pretty Petal instructed the Ministry of Defence to push back migrant boats, Ben Wallace’s ministry of defence said no. Mogg doesn’t seem to have cabinet support for things he is up to, and oddly doesn’t seem to care he doesn’t.
Is authority and collective responsibility melting away in front of us, as it would when games up for dead ducks?
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He wanted to own the libs.
$44BN to own the libs. Hope it’s worth it.
As recently as 2020 he was 'only' worth less than $40bn according to wiki. Not sure what the tipping point was which caused his wealth to shoot up 4x in a year.
Probably the value of Tesla stock as it’s done pretty well since 2020.
Yes, but what drove the sudden rise?
$5bn operating profit last quarter and a dizzying growth rate. People don't buy EVs, they buy Teslas. Case in point, now that our move to Switzerland is close to being canned (praise be to whoever or whatever higher power convinced my wife) we've begun looking for a car, the Model X is at the top of the shopping list.
You sure you don't want a Nissan Leaf instead ;-)
It was the best selling Electric car in the world until a couple of years ago.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
I’m not sure it’s cheap, it feels like a calculated gamble from Musk. But it is calculated. Twitter is probably the most important social medium in the western world (for political influence)
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
Yep. Just needs a Marion Davies and a Rosebud.
Musk could have “Twitter editorials” once a week - that go on everyone’s feed. Ten tweet long threads summarising his opinions
Reaching hundreds of millions of people and influencing the immediate global debate much more than even a New York Times or fox or BBC or whatever
It’s his new toy. He can do what he likes. I can see the appeal for a man who has already done almost everything and is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He wanted to own the libs.
$44BN to own the libs. Hope it’s worth it.
As recently as 2020 he was 'only' worth less than $40bn according to wiki. Not sure what the tipping point was which caused his wealth to shoot up 4x in a year.
Probably the value of Tesla stock as it’s done pretty well since 2020.
Yes, but what drove the sudden rise?
$5bn operating profit last quarter and a dizzying growth rate. People don't buy EVs, they buy Teslas. Case in point, now that our move to Switzerland is close to being canned (praise be to whoever or whatever higher power convinced my wife) we've begun looking for a car, the Model X is at the top of the shopping list.
When my Fiesta got rescued from the end of a Highland landrover track after being slightly on fire, the man who picked me up desperately urged me never to buy a Tesla.
He seemed to make most of his living picking them up from the NC500.
Because they're unreliable, or because everyone's surprised that the north of Scotland isn't a massive hotbed of electric charging points?
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
Find yourself a guy selling boiled peanuts by the side of the road, and you've got it made.
Boiled?! Really?
Yes. It's a Deep South thing. They boil up peanuts in the shell in a big pot, then ladle them out into a paper bag. Which is characteristically wet on the bottom, naturally.
Personally think they are NOT as tasty and ten-times messier than baking peanuts sans shells.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
He’s not buying it to make money. He’s buying it for the political power it gives him
Tho of course in the end that power = money. Every President will want to be his friend
Wallace now looks the best bet to me if Boris goes
I think Truss is much more likely than Wallace. She has the necessary chutzpah.
Truss net rating with the public -7%, Wallace net rating +2% now. Wallace is the only Cabinet Minister with a higher net rating than Starmer's -1%. He could be John Major 2.
Is there a war bounce element to Wally’s ratings though? Whilst others, especially Sunak, have had to deliver bad news, every time I see or hear of Wally he is getting a thumbs up from me for helping Ukraine and dissing Putin.
Does he have the skill set to be a great front man, or just the solid deputy to someone else? The great danger in this situation is some candidates are beginning to look good simply through being an unknown quantity not taking the brickbats in the front line. In terms of the skill set to carry off fronting the band, despite everything, that person is still Boris - the silver tongued cad, who’d charm you into bed and then disappear, still sounds persuasive, only the difference now is the knowledge of him as the scoundrel, rather than the honest guy.
If we ignore the homage to "Boris" you make a good point.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
FB Marketing is even more powerful and easier than that - you can just use the pixel so that Facebook can find out who your buyers are, and get it to find lookalikes. It might turn out that 29yr olds are a better bet.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
The other secret of Facebook is one of, if not the biggest purchasers of data in the world. So you give them a load of your info for free and then they can buy up all this semi anonymous data and deanonymise it, and pass it through all their massive ML models.
Even if you don't create an account, they build ones for everybody, which they search out what they can attach to that.
These holiday licensing stories are just pure PR for the government. So annoying that the BBC just parrots this bilge time after time.
English pubs haven’t been prevented from opening past 11 for nearly two decades. Many pubs already open past 11 every day. My local, for example, has a licence until 1am but simply chooses not to use it outside special occasions.
Precisely none of the pubs in my part of London are only licensed until 11pm. All have licences. until at least 12am, which is very common.
Where does the BBC get this bizarre idea that English pubs are mandated by national law to close at 11pm? That hasn’t been the law since 2004 FFS.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
He’s not buying it to make money. He’s buying it for the political power it gives him
Tho of course in the end that power = money. Every President will want to be his friend
Find yourself a guy selling boiled peanuts by the side of the road, and you've got it made.
Boiled?! Really?
Yes. It's a Deep South thing. They boil up peanuts in the shell in a big pot, then ladle them out into a paper bag. Which is characteristically wet on the bottom, naturally.
Personally think they are NOT as tasty and ten-times messier than baking peanuts sans shells.
Don’t like the sound of that but I LOVE those little Louisiana chili peppers in vinegar you can see in the photo. So simple. Yet brilliant
I’ve worked out how to do a decent picnic even in the boondocks of the USA (like Muscle Shoals).
You go to the Walmart and buy their bog standard subs but you make sure you have good condiments (Kikkoman soy, sriracha) some extra ham and tomato, a jar of those pickled chilis, head out into the hickory woods with a six pack of cold bottled craft beer, a few berries for afters. Yum. And burp. Put your feet on the dash and watch the buzzards over the flowing Tennessee
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
He’s not buying it to make money. He’s buying it for the political power it gives him
Tho of course in the end that power = money. Every President will want to be his friend
I think that's absolutely right.
Mind you... if they require authentication, then a lot of political figures will turn out to have a lot fewer followers than previously
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
He’s not buying it to make money. He’s buying it for the political power it gives him
Tho of course in the end that power = money. Every President will want to be his friend
One of the secrets of Franklin Roosevelt's electoral success, was his ability to reach & persuade voters despite fact that 95% of US publishers & media moguls (outside of the Solid South) of HIS day were definitely NOT friends of FDR.
45 pulled off much the same trick (with Fox being Solid South for him) despite active ire of NYT and bulk of current media establishment.
These holiday licensing stories are just pure PR for the government. So annoying that the BBC just parrots this bilge time after time.
English pubs haven’t been prevented from opening past 11 for nearly two decades. Many pubs already open past 11 every day. My local, for example, has a licence until 1am but simply chooses not to use it outside special occasions.
Precisely none of the pubs in my part of London are only licensed until 11pm. All have licences. until at least 12am, which is very common.
Where does the BBC get this bizarre idea that English pubs are mandated by national law to close at 11pm? That hasn’t been the law since 2004 FFS.
I believe it covers any pub that has a licence with a closing time of earlier than 1am. Many still do.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
Which means that forcing user authentication has two beneficial outcomes: it makes running bot factories harder, and it gives Twitter a lot of information on its users, allowing them to close that advertising value gap.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
FB Marketing is even more powerful and easier than that - you can just use the pixel so that Facebook can find out who your buyers are, and get it to find lookalikes. It might turn out that 29yr olds are a better bet.
The Pixel works better in the web selling world, than the mobile one, but - yes - we use that too.
These holiday licensing stories are just pure PR for the government. So annoying that the BBC just parrots this bilge time after time.
English pubs haven’t been prevented from opening past 11 for nearly two decades. Many pubs already open past 11 every day. My local, for example, has a licence until 1am but simply chooses not to use it outside special occasions.
Precisely none of the pubs in my part of London are only licensed until 11pm. All have licences. until at least 12am, which is very common.
Where does the BBC get this bizarre idea that English pubs are mandated by national law to close at 11pm? That hasn’t been the law since 2004 FFS.
A quick skim of wiki suggests it’s a bit more complicated than that. In theory pubs can have a 24 hour licence, but not all do, and this extension is aimed squarly at those who normally do close at 11. Most likely not big city places etc, thinking more your village boozer. So although in theory there is no need for the extension, in practice a lot of places will actually need it rather than specifically changing their licence.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
Which means that forcing user authentication has two beneficial outcomes: it makes running bot factories harder, and it gives Twitter a lot of information on its users, allowing them to close that advertising value gap.
But it is a risk. Having to identify to have an account could kill it off.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
Yes, I think that's where the unrealised value is, twitter's user profile is terrible, especially compared to Facebook let alone Google. One of the major changes will be widening user verification from specially selected self important blue tick wankers to anyone who submits a government ID and biographical data. It expands the number of users worth the $10-12 per click from maybe 1% of MAU to 20-30x that, pushing click value up significantly. The whole push to remove bots with user verification is simply to get people to put their info into their user profile.
What's also another unrealised revenue stream dependent on biographical and location data is local events/advertising. I get a metric shit ton of adverts on Instagram for stuff happening in London. That's because Facebook knows I live there, I've previously told them that and when I make a story the location is usually London based. Twitter is unable to serve any of these adverts.
Finally, everyone knows the Twitter app is a pile of wank yet no significant resources have been invested in engineering to improve it for a while. That plus allowing third party hooks is completely insane as power users who are highly valuable use third party apps and completely avoid Twitter's advertising.
If I was building a social media platform in order to monetise it, I'd do the opposite of what Twitter has done. Instagram seems like the best model and unsurprisingly it has easily become Meta's most important service now that Facebook has become more difficult to monetise.
Find yourself a guy selling boiled peanuts by the side of the road, and you've got it made.
Boiled?! Really?
Yes. It's a Deep South thing. They boil up peanuts in the shell in a big pot, then ladle them out into a paper bag. Which is characteristically wet on the bottom, naturally.
Personally think they are NOT as tasty and ten-times messier than baking peanuts sans shells.
Don’t like the sound of that but I LOVE those little Louisiana chili peppers in vinegar you can see in the photo. So simple. Yet brilliant
I’ve worked out how to do a decent picnic even in the boondocks of the USA (like Muscle Shoals).
You go to the Walmart and buy their bog standard subs but you make sure you have good condiments (Kikkoman soy, sriracha) some extra ham and tomato, a jar of those pickled chilis, head out into the hickory woods with a six pack of cold bottled craft beer, a few berries for afters. Yum. And burp. Put your feet on the dash and watch the buzzards over the flowing Tennessee
Now Muscle Shoals has got the swampers And they've been known to pick a song or two Lord they get me off so much They pick me up when I'm feelin' blue Now how about you?
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Musk is a phenomenon. A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
He's got all the constituent elements for potential excellent Bond villainry. Mega-rich, bizarre name, plays with rockets, plans for off-world colonies, vehicle manufacturing, controller of public and political "debate" platform.
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
He’s not buying it to make money. He’s buying it for the political power it gives him
Tho of course in the end that power = money. Every President will want to be his friend
One of the secrets of Franklin Roosevelt's electoral success, was his ability to reach & persuade voters despite fact that 95% of US publishers & media moguls (outside of the Solid South) of HIS day were definitely NOT friends of FDR.
45 pulled off much the same trick (with Fox being Solid South for him) despite active ire of NYT and bulk of current media establishment.
Twitter is a small sub-section of the population but it’s one that has disproportionate impact on those who make the policy decisions, set the news etc. so it helps create news but it doesn’t necessarily influence a mass of the population because it doesn’t have the critical reach. Fox was probably far more important for 45 than Twitter.
In addition, Trump also got free publicity from his enemies - for every outraged NYT reader, there was a Billy Bob in Alabama cheering him on he had stuck it to the libs.
Musk is a phenomenon. A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
He's got all the constituent elements for potential excellent Bond villainry. Mega-rich, bizarre name, plays with rockets, plans for off-world colonies, vehicle manufacturing, controller of public and political "debate" platform.
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
Looking like a weirdo in an expensive ill-fitting suit doesn't hurt either.
Though could be hard on any girl friends he wishes to dump . . . into a pot of molten gold . . .
Musk is a phenomenon. A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
He's got all the constituent elements for potential excellent Bond villainry. Mega-rich, bizarre name, plays with rockets, plans for off-world colonies, vehicle manufacturing, controller of public and political "debate" platform.
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
Bezos feels closer to the archetypal Bond villain. He projects a very carefully managed image of his persona to the world. With Elon Musk you sort of get what you see, I'd say he's closer to Tony Stark than a Bond villain, a flawed narcissist.
These holiday licensing stories are just pure PR for the government. So annoying that the BBC just parrots this bilge time after time.
English pubs haven’t been prevented from opening past 11 for nearly two decades. Many pubs already open past 11 every day. My local, for example, has a licence until 1am but simply chooses not to use it outside special occasions.
Precisely none of the pubs in my part of London are only licensed until 11pm. All have licences. until at least 12am, which is very common.
Where does the BBC get this bizarre idea that English pubs are mandated by national law to close at 11pm? That hasn’t been the law since 2004 FFS.
I believe it covers any pub that has a licence with a closing time of earlier than 1am. Many still do.
Nope. It’s garbage. Who writes/edits this crap?
“The temporary extension to licensing regulations will not apply to supermarkets or off-licences.”
What ‘temporary extension to licensing regulations’ is this exactly? There is no such regulation that prevents post 11pm opening.
The entire premise on which the story is based is false. These “government lets pubs open past 11pm” stories during feasts or football are commonplace: yet they are complete rubbish. Pure vacuous PR.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
Find yourself a guy selling boiled peanuts by the side of the road, and you've got it made.
Boiled?! Really?
Yes. It's a Deep South thing. They boil up peanuts in the shell in a big pot, then ladle them out into a paper bag. Which is characteristically wet on the bottom, naturally.
Personally think they are NOT as tasty and ten-times messier than baking peanuts sans shells.
Don’t like the sound of that but I LOVE those little Louisiana chili peppers in vinegar you can see in the photo. So simple. Yet brilliant
I’ve worked out how to do a decent picnic even in the boondocks of the USA (like Muscle Shoals).
You go to the Walmart and buy their bog standard subs but you make sure you have good condiments (Kikkoman soy, sriracha) some extra ham and tomato, a jar of those pickled chilis, head out into the hickory woods with a six pack of cold bottled craft beer, a few berries for afters. Yum. And burp. Put your feet on the dash and watch the buzzards over the flowing Tennessee
Bliss
Hope you checked you’re allowed the open container in the car!
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Wallace now looks the best bet to me if Boris goes
I think Truss is much more likely than Wallace. She has the necessary chutzpah.
Truss net rating with the public -7%, Wallace net rating +2% now. Wallace is the only Cabinet Minister with a higher net rating than Starmer's -1%. He could be John Major 2.
Is there a war bounce element to Wally’s ratings though? Whilst others, especially Sunak, have had to deliver bad news, every time I see or hear of Wally he is getting a thumbs up from me for helping Ukraine and dissing Putin.
Does he have the skill set to be a great front man, or just the solid deputy to someone else? The great danger in this situation is some candidates are beginning to look good simply through being an unknown quantity not taking the brickbats in the front line. In terms of the skill set to carry off fronting the band, despite everything, that person is still Boris - the silver tongued cad, who’d charm you into bed and then disappear, still sounds persuasive, only the difference now is the knowledge of him as the scoundrel, rather than the honest guy.
If we ignore the homage to "Boris" you make a good point.
In the first half, which includes the heart melting love actually skit, he’s the most charismatic and exciting character in the play. Indeed even when he has taken the ingénue’s virginity we all expect him to follow through on his promises. But then that character we love just disappears, as with the old adage “the more you know the more you see differently”. Wickham? Steerforth? No - I am calling Boris a cunt. Hardly a homage.
Find yourself a guy selling boiled peanuts by the side of the road, and you've got it made.
Boiled?! Really?
Yes. It's a Deep South thing. They boil up peanuts in the shell in a big pot, then ladle them out into a paper bag. Which is characteristically wet on the bottom, naturally.
Personally think they are NOT as tasty and ten-times messier than baking peanuts sans shells.
Don’t like the sound of that but I LOVE those little Louisiana chili peppers in vinegar you can see in the photo. So simple. Yet brilliant
I’ve worked out how to do a decent picnic even in the boondocks of the USA (like Muscle Shoals).
You go to the Walmart and buy their bog standard subs but you make sure you have good condiments (Kikkoman soy, sriracha) some extra ham and tomato, a jar of those pickled chilis, head out into the hickory woods with a six pack of cold bottled craft beer, a few berries for afters. Yum. And burp. Put your feet on the dash and watch the buzzards over the flowing Tennessee
Bliss
Hope you checked you’re allowed the open container in the car!
Hell no.
EDIT - Even the lawyer in "My Cousin Vinny" would know enough to tell him that.
Musk is a phenomenon. A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
He's got all the constituent elements for potential excellent Bond villainry. Mega-rich, bizarre name, plays with rockets, plans for off-world colonies, vehicle manufacturing, controller of public and political "debate" platform.
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
Bezos feels closer to the archetypal Bond villain. He projects a very carefully managed image of his persona to the world. With Elon Musk you sort of get what you see, I'd say he's closer to Tony Stark than a Bond villain, a flawed narcissist.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
I’m not sure it’s cheap, it feels like a calculated gamble from Musk. But it is calculated. Twitter is probably the most important social medium in the western world (for political influence)
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
Yep. Just needs a Marion Davies and a Rosebud.
Musk could have “Twitter editorials” once a week - that go on everyone’s feed. Ten tweet long threads summarising his opinions
Reaching hundreds of millions of people and influencing the immediate global debate much more than even a New York Times or fox or BBC or whatever
It’s his new toy. He can do what he likes. I can see the appeal for a man who has already done almost everything and is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars
That sort of thing yes. Not healthy.
He's a complex character. Sort of a cross between Dominic Cummings, Darth Vadar, Gordon Gekko, Brian Wilson and Batman.
Still, rather him than some others I can think of in that rarified financial bracket.
These holiday licensing stories are just pure PR for the government. So annoying that the BBC just parrots this bilge time after time.
English pubs haven’t been prevented from opening past 11 for nearly two decades. Many pubs already open past 11 every day. My local, for example, has a licence until 1am but simply chooses not to use it outside special occasions.
Precisely none of the pubs in my part of London are only licensed until 11pm. All have licences. until at least 12am, which is very common.
Where does the BBC get this bizarre idea that English pubs are mandated by national law to close at 11pm? That hasn’t been the law since 2004 FFS.
A quick skim of wiki suggests it’s a bit more complicated than that. In theory pubs can have a 24 hour licence, but not all do, and this extension is aimed squarly at those who normally do close at 11. Most likely not big city places etc, thinking more your village boozer. So although in theory there is no need for the extension, in practice a lot of places will actually need it rather than specifically changing their licence.
There’s a pub near me out in countryside that closes at 10pm. So what? As you say, pubs can open and close when they like provided they meet the local licensing conditions. This doesn’t change that: the premise of the whole non-story is completely false.
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He wanted to own the libs.
$44BN to own the libs. Hope it’s worth it.
As recently as 2020 he was 'only' worth less than $40bn according to wiki. Not sure what the tipping point was which caused his wealth to shoot up 4x in a year.
Probably the value of Tesla stock as it’s done pretty well since 2020.
Yes, but what drove the sudden rise?
$5bn operating profit last quarter and a dizzying growth rate. People don't buy EVs, they buy Teslas. Case in point, now that our move to Switzerland is close to being canned (praise be to whoever or whatever higher power convinced my wife) we've begun looking for a car, the Model X is at the top of the shopping list.
When my Fiesta got rescued from the end of a Highland landrover track after being slightly on fire, the man who picked me up desperately urged me never to buy a Tesla.
He seemed to make most of his living picking them up from the NC500.
Because they're unreliable, or because everyone's surprised that the north of Scotland isn't a massive hotbed of electric charging points?
Apparently the "important stuff" is fine but everything else breaks and has the car has to make its way to dealership to get fixed.
There are charging points at every overpriced b&b you can throw your wallet at up here. Even ones in the Hebrides.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Musk is a phenomenon. A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
He's got all the constituent elements for potential excellent Bond villainry. Mega-rich, bizarre name, plays with rockets, plans for off-world colonies, vehicle manufacturing, controller of public and political "debate" platform.
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
Bezos feels closer to the archetypal Bond villain. He projects a very carefully managed image of his persona to the world. With Elon Musk you sort of get what you see, I'd say he's closer to Tony Stark than a Bond villain, a flawed narcissist.
I do wonder if Musk is actually projecting a carefully managed image of his persona to the world so that people think he's Tony Stark.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
I’m not sure it’s cheap, it feels like a calculated gamble from Musk. But it is calculated. Twitter is probably the most important social medium in the western world (for political influence)
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
Yep. Just needs a Marion Davies and a Rosebud.
Musk could have “Twitter editorials” once a week - that go on everyone’s feed. Ten tweet long threads summarising his opinions
Reaching hundreds of millions of people and influencing the immediate global debate much more than even a New York Times or fox or BBC or whatever
It’s his new toy. He can do what he likes. I can see the appeal for a man who has already done almost everything and is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars
That sort of thing yes. Not healthy.
He's a complex character. Sort of a cross between Dominic Cummings, Darth Vadar, Gordon Gekko, Brian Wilson and Batman.
Still, rather him than some others I can think of in that rarified financial bracket.
“The newspapers attacking me are not newspapers in the ordinary sense. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal vices, personal likes and dislikes of the [owners]. . . .
What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” - Stanley Baldwin 1931 (ghosted by Rudyard Kipling)
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Nah, it's very easy to see how a user got to your site. Any analytics tool will monitor it for you and all of the click information is bundled into the sref which the end user won't see. For Facebook and Google it's trivially easy, you serve adverts on search key words or groups relating to key words for specific times of the day or locations etc...
Social media marketing and Google Ad analytics is a huge industry, suggesting that working out click through rates or what drove a specific click is difficult to work out, especially from Google, Facebook or Instagram is a very outdated view.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
Musk is a phenomenon. A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
He's got all the constituent elements for potential excellent Bond villainry. Mega-rich, bizarre name, plays with rockets, plans for off-world colonies, vehicle manufacturing, controller of public and political "debate" platform.
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
Bezos feels closer to the archetypal Bond villain. He projects a very carefully managed image of his persona to the world. With Elon Musk you sort of get what you see, I'd say he's closer to Tony Stark than a Bond villain, a flawed narcissist.
I do wonder if Musk is actually projecting a carefully managed image of his persona to the world so that people think he's Tony Stark.
Wallace now looks the best bet to me if Boris goes
I think Truss is much more likely than Wallace. She has the necessary chutzpah.
Truss net rating with the public -7%, Wallace net rating +2% now. Wallace is the only Cabinet Minister with a higher net rating than Starmer's -1%. He could be John Major 2.
Is there a war bounce element to Wally’s ratings though? Whilst others, especially Sunak, have had to deliver bad news, every time I see or hear of Wally he is getting a thumbs up from me for helping Ukraine and dissing Putin.
Does he have the skill set to be a great front man, or just the solid deputy to someone else? The great danger in this situation is some candidates are beginning to look good simply through being an unknown quantity not taking the brickbats in the front line. In terms of the skill set to carry off fronting the band, despite everything, that person is still Boris - the silver tongued cad, who’d charm you into bed and then disappear, still sounds persuasive, only the difference now is the knowledge of him as the scoundrel, rather than the honest guy.
If we ignore the homage to "Boris" you make a good point.
In the first half, which includes the heart melting love actually skit, he’s the most charismatic and exciting character in the play. Indeed even when he has taken the ingénue’s virginity we all expect him to follow through on his promises. But then that character we love just disappears, as with the old adage “the more you know the more you see differently”. Wickham? Steerforth? No - I am calling Boris a cunt. Hardly a homage.
Yes alright. But that first half - which was much less than a half - is long gone. And it was phoney. So no need to mention it now.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
Baldy Bezos must be well pissed off. Elon has much bigger and better dildos that go to space and now in the game of dick swinging bought the modern day town square, while Bezos left with the dead tree press publication.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Nah, it's very easy to see how a user got to your site. Any analytics tool will monitor it for you and all of the click information is bundled into the sref which the end user won't see. For Facebook and Google it's trivially easy, you serve adverts on search key words or groups relating to key words for specific times of the day or locations etc...
Social media marketing and Google Ad analytics is a huge industry, suggesting that working out click through rates or what drove a specific click is difficult to work out, especially from Google, Facebook or Instagram is a very outdated view.
I really want to get into this stuff again. The Google analytics for the club I helped run at Uni were just amazing, really helped us understand what people wanted out of the website (and which committee members were most fancied....)
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
+100
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
A total misunderstanding of Twitter
And advertising/data.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
I’m not sure it’s cheap, it feels like a calculated gamble from Musk. But it is calculated. Twitter is probably the most important social medium in the western world (for political influence)
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
Yep. Just needs a Marion Davies and a Rosebud.
Musk could have “Twitter editorials” once a week - that go on everyone’s feed. Ten tweet long threads summarising his opinions
Reaching hundreds of millions of people and influencing the immediate global debate much more than even a New York Times or fox or BBC or whatever
It’s his new toy. He can do what he likes. I can see the appeal for a man who has already done almost everything and is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars
That sort of thing yes. Not healthy.
He's a complex character. Sort of a cross between Dominic Cummings, Darth Vadar, Gordon Gekko, Brian Wilson and Batman.
Still, rather him than some others I can think of in that rarified financial bracket.
He seems to be a weird dude, and some of his 'throw at the wall and see what sticks' approach seems, to the layman, likely to be a disaster, but at least some of his companies actually make stuff or innovate things, rather than just serve as mechanisms to manipulate people through algorithms, which is better than some others.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
In defence of Mr Ed, I believe he is talking about brand reach, where TV is still - even in 2022 - considered the most effective channel.
More relevant for things like chocolate brands than B2B SaaS.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
+100
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
Optimising for NDR as one CMO put it to me this week.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
In defence of Mr Ed, I believe he is talking about brand reach, where TV is still - even in 2022 - considered the most effective channel.
More relevant for things like chocolate brands than B2B SaaS.
Maybe, I remain to be convinced though. I'd probably want to be on TikTok and YouTube, maybe Instagram.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
Depends on the size of the company.
Direct Line is very clear about this - the best combo is TV +’search, TV to drive brand and Search so people go online afterwards.
Many CMOs implicitly recognise spending solely on online doesn’t work but, if they tell their Boards that, they are seen as backwards looking and pushed out the door.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
In defence of Mr Ed, I believe he is talking about brand reach, where TV is still - even in 2022 - considered the most effective channel.
More relevant for things like chocolate brands than B2B SaaS.
Cheers @Gardenwalker. I’d also add there is a reason why some of the biggest spenders on TV ads these days are online companies. After a certain point, TV becomes less effective.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
Depends on the size of the company.
Direct Line is very clear about this - the best combo is TV +’search, TV to drive brand and Search so people go online afterwards.
Many CMOs implicitly recognise spending solely on online doesn’t work but, if they tell their Boards that, they are seen as backwards looking and pushed out the door.
Direct Line is an old persons company. It has old people clients and is run, primarily by old people for old people. TV will work fine for them, eventually it won't as new customers stop replacing dead ones because smaller insurance companies that have targeted them on Google and Instagram will already have their business.
It's why there's so many insurance start ups, the market is already shifting. In an adjacent industry it's causing the likes of Hargreaves to try and compete with Trading212, Freetrade and soon Robin Hood because they've realised they have zero market share under the age of 40.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
The problem though is that you don’t know what drove the lead.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
In defence of Mr Ed, I believe he is talking about brand reach, where TV is still - even in 2022 - considered the most effective channel.
More relevant for things like chocolate brands than B2B SaaS.
Cheers @Gardenwalker. I’d also add there is a reason why some of the biggest spenders on TV ads these days are online companies. After a certain point, TV becomes less effective.
As you implicitly say, once you are trying to address a large enough market, you need TV for reach.
TikTok and Insta only get to certain (albeit very interesting) demographics.
You need TV for top of funnel reach/awareness, and then supporting web channels for conversion (if conversion can be done digitally).
Ukrainian Refugees as Percent of Total Population of Poland
"As of Thursday, April 21, just shy of 1 million people applied for the special "UKR" refugee status, of them nearly 0.5M children under 18. This is around 2.7% of total population of Poland. Together with the 0.8-1.2 million Ukrainians already working and living in Poland before the invasion (who did not count towards the official population figure), around 5% of people in Poland now are Ukrainian.
Recent refugees form the highest share of population in several counties in the mountains and on the seaside, where many refugees with no existing connection to Poland were routed to be housed in hotels, Airbnbs and B&Bs.
Among larger cities, Warsaw is home to 90k refugees, nearly 5% of total official population. Wrocław and Poznań are the next big destinations. The industrial cities of Upper Silesia (Katowice, Tychy, Gliwice and Bielsko-Biała), where thousands of jobs were vacant before the war, are high on the list as well."
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
The problem though is that you don’t know what drove the lead.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
Yes, you do. If someone's searching for your company name and click through you stick it down to some referral category. Who the hell is paying for display or other adverts on searches for their own company name, other than to block out competitors.
Organic hits and direct hits also feed into attribution modelling.
You have a view of online marketing based on 10 years ago.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
Depends on the size of the company.
Direct Line is very clear about this - the best combo is TV +’search, TV to drive brand and Search so people go online afterwards.
Many CMOs implicitly recognise spending solely on online doesn’t work but, if they tell their Boards that, they are seen as backwards looking and pushed out the door.
Direct Line is an old persons company. It has old people clients and is run, primarily by old people for old people. TV will work fine for them, eventually it won't as new customers stop replacing dead ones because smaller insurance companies that have targeted them on Google and Instagram will already have their business.
It's why there's so many insurance start ups, the market is already shifting. In an adjacent industry it's causing the likes of Hargreaves to try and compete with Trading212, Freetrade and soon Robin Hood because they've realised they have zero market share under the age of 40.
Mmmmmmm
Take a look at the strategy of these start-ups, it’s pretty clear - start advertising online and then go to more traditional media. You can’t get reach solely with online unless you want a niche (or you’re Elon Musk).
Take another sector. Amongst the biggest spenders on TV at the moment are companies such as Just Eat and Deliveroo. Certainly not old people’s companies unless you think the Grannies are ordering MacyDs at 12pm at night.
The idea that everyone < 35 is watching online is a lazy one and there are already signs YT / FB usage is coming off the boil (take a look ag FB’s last reports)
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
The problem though is that you don’t know what drove the lead.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
True I guess. BUT without the google ad to find, how would Joe have found Bob?
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
The problem though is that you don’t know what drove the lead.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
Yes, you do. If someone's searching for your company name and click through you stick it down to some referral category. Who the hell is paying for display or other adverts on searches for their own company name, other than to block out competitors.
Organic hits and direct hits also feed into attribution modelling.
You have a view of online marketing based on 10 years ago.
Not really, considering I speak with a hell of a lot of CMOs and advertising people. Attribution is the big topic at the moment (with measurement) and there is a realisation the system is broken and needs to be repaired.
But don’t take my words for it. Read through FB’s comments at their last results, they are explicit about their measurement / targeting issues
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
The problem though is that you don’t know what drove the lead.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
Yes, you do. If someone's searching for your company name and click through you stick it down to some referral category. Who the hell is paying for display or other adverts on searches for their own company name, other than to block out competitors.
Organic hits and direct hits also feed into attribution modelling.
You have a view of online marketing based on 10 years ago.
Not really, considering I speak with a hell of a lot of CMOs and advertising people. Attribution is the big topic at the moment (with measurement) and there is a realisation the system is broken and needs to be repaired.
But don’t take my words for it. Read through FB’s comments at their last results, they are explicit about their measurement / targeting issues
Hmm, we're clearly speaking to different people. Click attribution is trivially easy, lead scoring is the big one as it directly impacts RoI. Companies are trying to reduce time spent on poor quality leads and better nurture high quality ones, figuring out which leads are high quality and then looking at which campaigns generated them, at what time of day, what locale etc... is the big one. That allows companies directly generate higher RoI based on running better campaigns and generating higher quality leads or fewer lower quality ones.
Companies which have good quality lead scoring models tend to be the ones that succeed as they aren't wasting resources on low value or high churn customers.
Comments
Does he have the skill set to be a great front man, or just the solid deputy to someone else? The great danger in this situation is some candidates are beginning to look good simply through being an unknown quantity not taking the brickbats in the front line. In terms of the skill set to carry off fronting the band, despite everything, that person is still Boris - the silver tongued cad, who’d charm you into bed and then disappear, still sounds persuasive, only the difference now is the knowledge of him as the scoundrel, rather than the honest guy.
What I'm still shocked by is how cheap the deal actually looks. $44bn seems, on the face of it, the deal of the century. Eventually Elon shifts the debt onto Twitter's balance sheet and that forces an ethos of profitability over wankery among the management who will derive a large proportion of their income based on company performance.
Makes a change from Johnson v Corbyn though which was perhaps a bit too much charisma and populism
Fpt
Indianapolis and Greenfield
That merger really was such a horrible idea.
The ex US President and possibly next President wants to get back on it, desperately. Because of the voice it gives him. Nothing compares to Twitter in this particular way
So this is the 21st century equivalent of Hearst or Beaverbrook or Murdoch. Mega rich men buying serious political influence via the media. It’s just the media that have changed
Interesting vid was posted on YouTube this week, check out the Indy Canal Walk . . , here AND on the ground.
History Guy - The Indiana Central Canal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmq_22dThYQ
ADDENDUM - Greenfield is home to Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley . . . and his home.
Eden, MacMillan, Douglas-Hume, Callaghan, Major, Brown and May were all either Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary when taking over from a Prime Minister outside an election.
I fully accept Johnson was none of these though he had been May's Foreign Secretary.
I struggle with Wallace going straight to the top job from the second tier of Cabinet but you know the Conservative membership far better than most of us. The problem is the membership only matters once the parliamentary party have had their say and whittled the field down to a final two. IF Wallace makes it to the last two, he could emulate Iain Duncan-Smith who was Defence Secretary (albeit in a Shadow capacity) when succeeding William Hague (and in the process defeating the Shadow Chancellor - the Shadow FS and Shadow HS didn't stand).
He seemed to make most of his living picking them up from the NC500.
Terrible decision, pitching outside leg and still given out
One of our sides openers, and winner of the batting trophy most years, had his arm broken on Saturday by a full bunger (Beamer). Not a great start to the year...
Just a flurry of stories, each on their own not remarkable, firstly as TSE expertly put it, a PM with majority of 80 didn’t fight the new parliamentary enquiry into Partygate, and then the rumours of dropping many plans announced in current Queens Speech more than a few don’t even seem that controversial to me to whip. Pretty Petal instructed the Ministry of Defence to push back migrant boats, Ben Wallace’s ministry of defence said no. Mogg doesn’t seem to have cabinet support for things he is up to, and oddly doesn’t seem to care he doesn’t.
Is authority and collective responsibility melting away in front of us, as it would when games up for dead ducks?
Reaching hundreds of millions of people and influencing the immediate global debate much more than even a New York Times or fox or BBC or whatever
It’s his new toy. He can do what he likes. I can see the appeal for a man who has already done almost everything and is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
Personally think they are NOT as tasty and ten-times messier than baking peanuts sans shells.
Tho of course in the end that power = money. Every President will want to be his friend
My PB search abilities are not up to much, perhaps a someone with better technical skills can arbitrate so that we don’t have to resort to violence.
A scary one, but an astonishing figure nonetheless.
His ideas for Twitter sound positive and maybe even profitable.
Even if you don't create an account, they build ones for everybody, which they search out what they can attach to that.
These holiday licensing stories are just pure PR for the government. So annoying that the BBC just parrots this bilge time after time.
English pubs haven’t been prevented from opening past 11 for nearly two decades. Many pubs already open past 11 every day. My local, for example, has a licence until 1am but simply chooses not to use it outside special occasions.
Precisely none of the pubs in my part of London are only licensed until 11pm. All have licences. until at least 12am, which is very common.
Where does the BBC get this bizarre idea that English pubs are mandated by national law to close at 11pm? That hasn’t been the law since 2004 FFS.
the photo. So simple. Yet brilliant
I’ve worked out how to do a decent picnic even in the boondocks of the USA (like Muscle Shoals).
You go to the Walmart and buy their bog standard subs but you make sure you have good condiments (Kikkoman soy, sriracha) some extra ham and tomato, a jar of those pickled chilis, head out into the hickory woods with a six pack of cold bottled craft beer, a few berries for afters. Yum. And burp. Put your feet on the dash and watch the buzzards over the flowing Tennessee
Bliss
Mind you... if they require authentication, then a lot of political figures will turn out to have a lot fewer followers than previously
45 pulled off much the same trick (with Fox being Solid South for him) despite active ire of NYT and bulk of current media establishment.
So although in theory there is no need for the extension, in practice a lot of places will actually need it rather than specifically changing their licence.
What's also another unrealised revenue stream dependent on biographical and location data is local events/advertising. I get a metric shit ton of adverts on Instagram for stuff happening in London. That's because Facebook knows I live there, I've previously told them that and when I make a story the location is usually London based. Twitter is unable to serve any of these adverts.
Finally, everyone knows the Twitter app is a pile of wank yet no significant resources have been invested in engineering to improve it for a while. That plus allowing third party hooks is completely insane as power users who are highly valuable use third party apps and completely avoid Twitter's advertising.
If I was building a social media platform in order to monetise it, I'd do the opposite of what Twitter has done. Instagram seems like the best model and unsurprisingly it has easily become Meta's most important service now that Facebook has become more difficult to monetise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4EK_XrSkMU
Now Muscle Shoals has got the swampers
And they've been known to pick a song or two
Lord they get me off so much
They pick me up when I'm feelin' blue
Now how about you?
If he moves his base of operations into a volcano...
In addition, Trump also got free publicity from his enemies - for every outraged NYT reader, there was a Billy Bob in Alabama cheering him on he had stuck it to the libs.
Though could be hard on any girl friends he wishes to dump . . . into a pot of molten gold . . .
“The temporary extension to licensing regulations will not apply to supermarkets or off-licences.”
What ‘temporary extension to licensing regulations’ is this exactly? There is no such regulation that prevents post 11pm opening.
The entire premise on which the story is based is false. These “government lets pubs open past 11pm” stories during feasts or football are commonplace: yet they are complete rubbish. Pure vacuous PR.
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
EDIT - Even the lawyer in "My Cousin Vinny" would know enough to tell him that.
He's a complex character. Sort of a cross between Dominic Cummings, Darth Vadar, Gordon Gekko, Brian Wilson and Batman.
Still, rather him than some others I can think of in that rarified financial bracket.
There are charging points at every overpriced b&b you can throw your wallet at up here. Even ones in the Hebrides.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” - Stanley Baldwin 1931 (ghosted by Rudyard Kipling)
Social media marketing and Google Ad analytics is a huge industry, suggesting that working out click through rates or what drove a specific click is difficult to work out, especially from Google, Facebook or Instagram is a very outdated view.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10751737/Children-unknowingly-hepatitis-experts-claim-amid-mysterious-global-spate-cases.html
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
More relevant for things like chocolate brands than B2B SaaS.
Direct Line is very clear about this - the best combo is TV +’search, TV to drive brand and Search so people go online afterwards.
Many CMOs implicitly recognise spending solely on online doesn’t work but, if they tell their Boards that, they are seen as backwards looking and pushed out the door.
It's why there's so many insurance start ups, the market is already shifting. In an adjacent industry it's causing the likes of Hargreaves to try and compete with Trading212, Freetrade and soon Robin Hood because they've realised they have zero market share under the age of 40.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
TikTok and Insta only get to certain (albeit very interesting) demographics.
You need TV for top of funnel reach/awareness, and then supporting web channels for conversion (if conversion can be done digitally).
I'd better go to bed!
"As of Thursday, April 21, just shy of 1 million people applied for the special "UKR" refugee status, of them nearly 0.5M children under 18. This is around 2.7% of total population of Poland. Together with the 0.8-1.2 million Ukrainians already working and living in Poland before the invasion (who did not count towards the official population figure), around 5% of people in Poland now are Ukrainian.
Recent refugees form the highest share of population in several counties in the mountains and on the seaside, where many refugees with no existing connection to Poland were routed to be housed in hotels, Airbnbs and B&Bs.
Among larger cities, Warsaw is home to 90k refugees, nearly 5% of total official population. Wrocław and Poznań are the next big destinations. The industrial cities of Upper Silesia (Katowice, Tychy, Gliwice and Bielsko-Biała), where thousands of jobs were vacant before the war, are high on the list as well."
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ubvvu7/ukrainian_refugees_as_of_total_population_by/
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
Organic hits and direct hits also feed into attribution modelling.
You have a view of online marketing based on 10 years ago.
Take a look at the strategy of these start-ups, it’s pretty clear - start advertising online and then go to more traditional media. You can’t get reach solely with online unless you want a niche (or you’re Elon Musk).
Take another sector. Amongst the biggest spenders on TV at the moment are companies such as Just Eat and Deliveroo. Certainly not old people’s companies unless you think the Grannies are ordering MacyDs at 12pm at night.
The idea that everyone < 35 is watching online is a lazy one and there are already signs YT / FB usage is coming off the boil (take a look ag FB’s last reports)
But don’t take my words for it. Read through FB’s comments at their last results, they are explicit about their measurement / targeting issues
Companies which have good quality lead scoring models tend to be the ones that succeed as they aren't wasting resources on low value or high churn customers.