Twitter Reports $645 Million Loss For 2013

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How in the hell did Twitter post a $645 million loss? Seriously, it is a microblogging site, someone needs to explain this to me. :eek:

Microblogging site Twitter has reported a net loss of $645m (£396m) for 2013, just three months after its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange. The loss was expected by analysts, who highlighted Twitter's revenues, which rose 110% last year to reach $665m. But a reported slow growth in user numbers was a bigger concern for investors.
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I knew twitter was going to be forever hamstrung by it's own name when I heard Stephen Colbert tell Meredith Vieira that he had "twatted" her on the Today Show when it first started to grow. Never "twatted" or "tweeted" but I've heard they have some interesting demographics as far as typical users. Not what you might expect.
 
It costs a lot of money for text(s), they must not have an unlimited plan or something.
 
HardUp4HardWare said:
Me too. I mean, I understand technically what it does, but I just do not understand why anyone would ever want or need to use it.
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The delusional belief that you need to broadcast your thoughts before they spend long enough in your brain to get sorted. That's what drives Twitter, that and it's a marketing tool that companies can use for free.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
The delusional belief that you need to broadcast your thoughts before they spend long enough in your brain to get sorted. That's what drives Twitter, that and it's a marketing tool that companies can use for free.
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Companies, and very high profile individuals like entertainers to make fans feel more "connected".
 
choppedliver said:
Nope. I tried it. didnt get it. Tried it again. Didn't get it. Sure as hell don't see why it's "worth" so much
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You clearly don't have enough delusions of importance and grandeur.


You should work on that.
 
pgwalsh said:
right there with you.
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Second that. Twitter reminds me of the remark in Dr Who's episode the Bells of saint John, where the doctor was explaing what had happened to her: Think of it he said People stuck in the WWW reaching out trying to connect, and clara said" Isn't that basically twitter?"
 
Hey guys, the internet is expensive. Try hosting a even shitty website that has no traffic. Internet search crawlers can take up your allotted starter bandwidth at most colo's.

As for Twitter;
It's actually a great site when trying to reach out to editors at websites, like gaming sites. It's a simple single/double response. Sometimes direct feedback in an elevator pitch type manner is entertaining. Think of it as a curated comment section. I can tweet at Danny O'Dwyer from Gamespot.com something like "hey I want to play fifa whats a good team to start as?" Usually a quick response like "Real Madrid will help you get the basics fast" is all you want and it makes you feel more invested into that editors work. It's a mutal realationship between content creators and consumers, it can help someone become a better writer and tailor more to there fanbase and niche.

It's also invaluable to smaller website operators that are busy all the time. Like say tested.com, if picture uploads is broken a tweet will alert them to contact someone that can fix it. Instead of waiting for them to check the bug forums a couple days later.

That's what I use it for, and it's been good to hear back from some of the people that I've followed their work for the years and give them a little feedback (if it's polite they usually respond to feedback) and very rare back and forth convo on a subject. As for celebrity stalking, don't care. Also, dell posts some awesome coupons every once and a while. I bought my laptop off of twitter 40% coupon.
 
Twitter is actually pretty cool if you follow the right accounts. I use almost like a news aggregator.
 
I never tweet but do use Twitter to check the news. I treat it like an RSS feed of sorts.
 
All these social sites are overpriced. While I think Facebook has more going for it than twitter, it's valuation is ridiculous as well. Facebook has a market cap of $160 billion! WTF.. That means they value each user at over $100/each.

These social stocks all smell like the dot com bubble that burst ~2001. Maybe 1-2 will grow into their valuations, but I'm staying a sceptic and I'm not investing in them personally.
 
heatlesssun said:
Twitter is actually pretty cool if you follow the right accounts. I use almost like a news aggregator.
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That's exactly what I use it for. There are the occasional BS personal posts, but most of the people I follow (Microsoft news and employees and other technology news), are very good with leaving that kind of stuff out.

Plus, on Tuesdays, there is the #Winchat. They also used to have non-NDA MS MVP chats via Twitter, which was fun.

It's a valuable tool if you use it in a certain way. For others, it's just a simple post what you're dick is doing at that second type of BS.

As far as news? I find posts from things seconds after they are posted. Pretty cool to watch my stream instead of hitting 100+ web sites.
 
heatlesssun said:
Twitter is actually pretty cool if you follow the right accounts. I use almost like a news aggregator.
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I don't tweet but I use Twitter to follow the news without ever having to watch TV. I also follow a few international reporters and figures who provide interesting news/facts. There are some comedians in there because, well, they tweet hilarious shit.
 
WinSomeLoseNone said:
I don't tweet but I use Twitter to follow the news without ever having to watch TV. I also follow a few international reporters and figures who provide interesting news/facts. There are some comedians in there because, well, they tweet hilarious shit.
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Exactly. There is a great deal of useful information on Twitter but tons of junk as well. But just about every news organization uses it now to report as well as major bloggers and sites. Even organizations like schools and churches use it to communicate.
 
Holy crap how does anything having to do with twitter even cost near that? I could probably host that in my basement if I had a connection that allowed servers in the TOS (I have fibre). From what I heard their DB is only a couple TB. It's nothing that crazy, and since it's mostly text based I don't imagine it takes that much resources compared to any other heavy traffic site. Maybe a couple servers for redundancy/fail over and that's about it.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Holy crap how does anything having to do with twitter even cost near that? I could probably host that in my basement if I had a connection that allowed servers in the TOS (I have fibre). From what I heard their DB is only a couple TB. It's nothing that crazy, and since it's mostly text based I don't imagine it takes that much resources compared to any other heavy traffic site. Maybe a couple servers for redundancy/fail over and that's about it.
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You know nothing about webhosting and database usage on that kind of scale...
 
Oh, that reminds me. It's time to twit my hourly twupdate.

'Sup, followers? Fry here. [belch] Burpin' eggs. Scratchin' my underarm fungus. Lookin' for love. Send.
 
@dmin said:
You know nothing about webhosting and database usage on that kind of scale...
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:rolleyes:

Have you seen twitter, it's very basic. The "scale" is not much compared to other sites. It does not take much to run it compared to big sites like Facebook, or big game servers, or heck, even news sites like CNN. Twitter is probably the most simple popular site out there. I can't seem to find the link, but I do recall reading an article explaining just how small twitter really is, it was actually kind of amazing as it's easy to immediately think a popular site is huge, but given the nature of twitter (microblogging) it does not really have to process that much data. There is not really anything special about it compared to other sites on the internet. 100's of millions is just absurd, and that's losses, who knows what their actual cost is.
 
rflcptr said:
definitely agreed. :) @NASA is just rich, for example.
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Thanks for the tip. Again, it's all about following quality accounts of interest to you. I really didn't use it much until about a year ago, now I'm a steady user. Don't tweet much myself though.
 
dgz said:
Oh, that reminds me. It's time to twit my hourly twupdate.

'Sup, followers? Fry here. [belch] Burpin' eggs. Scratchin' my underarm fungus. Lookin' for love. Send.
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Can't be real post. It's readable and doesn't have any hashtags.
 
@dmin said:
You know nothing about webhosting and database usage on that kind of scale...
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I think a lot of it has to do with where all that money's going. Is it really $645 in database maintenance and usage?

Or are there other costs (paying celebs to tweet, etc.)? For the life of me, I can't seem to figure out how Twitter makes any money at all.
 
Skripka said:
You clearly don't have enough delusions of importance and grandeur.


You should work on that.
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Yup, social media has created a new era of narcicism and egocentrism. Twitter especially.

It is however a great tool for companies to use as it is a cheap and powerful way to hock your warez.
 
Skripka said:
You clearly don't have enough delusions of importance and grandeur.


You should work on that.
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Boy you really need to work on your social skills,
learn not to read wayyyyyyy to much into things,
Don't be a dick just because you are behind a computer.
 
Commander FAT said:
Am I the only one here that still isn't 100% on what the fuck Twitter actually is?
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I dunno, I'm confused how 140 characters worth of text at a time ends up creating a loss of over half a billion dollars. I mean I understand server costs, but come on?
 
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