I have been heckling Twitter (the stock) since November 7, 2013. It looks like investors are finally getting the fact that Twitter only knows how to lose money, then make it up with stock diarrhea. They fired their CEO and are searching for a new one. After the IPO, Twitter had a market cap of $24.93 billion. Today, it is $23.51 billion. Still an amazing number considering they haven't made their first dollar of profit.
Twitter is seen as a valuable news source by millions of people, but as a company that can make profits, I concluded long ago it was not in their DNA. To make profits, they would probably need to tweet ads at people in about a 3:1 ratio to real tweets. The last time I tried to use it, I got mostly ads tweeted at me from news sources like the New York Times instead of news. I lasted one day before I quit. Good luck growing that user base if it turns into an ad spamming service.
Unlike Facebook, which has the richest set of user demographic data in the history of man, Twitter doesn't know very much about its users and I think will have a harder time with targeted ads. They also have to compete with Google for ads. Finally, there is evidence that millions of accounts are fake and that followers can be bought rather cheaply.
I think it is possible that Twitter could be scaled back and run profitably if they were made lean, focused on their core service, and stopped with the stock diarrhea. Maybe a new CEO will figure out how to do that, but the current culture is live large and poop stock certificates. A very dotcom bubble version 1 attitude that might be impossible to fix.
