It's fun to do the popular comparison of Twitter vs. Facebook as well.
It's interesting to note that in terms of revenue, Facebook is pulling in around $5/user/year right now. But their valuation per user is around $114-$143 (currently $80-100 billion).
FB claims 700+million users, with 600million active.
Twitter claims 175million users but going by your metrics a much lower percentage are active.[1]
Given these numbers and a common metric of valuation over 5 years (and the assumption of no more user growth...I know it's not realistic but it makes the math easy), FB has to figure out how to multiply $25/user (over 5 years) by 4 to 6.
Twitter has a much steeper hill to climb to justify their valuation. Not only do they have less information about a user (so targeting advertising is harder), but FB has other methods of revenuing a user, online apps, games, etc. Twitter hasn't even proposed a revenue model outside of limited, randomly sampled, access to global tweet streams (which are likely not a major revenue driver in anybody's business plan) and recently announced paid forced tweets just showing up in people's streams (which I'm sure will go over well sarcasm).
To make matters worse, their experience doesn't really require people to come to their website. And it appears most activity is not via the site, so embedded adverts are going to be very hard.[2]
I can't figure out the math on this to be honest. Hell, I can't figure out the math on FB, but they look positively reasonable compared to Twitter.
I completely agree. Twitter's motto of simplifying their current product definitely steepens the hill to justify their value. But then again, the whole concept behind Twitter is a simple microblogging service. Very hard to monetize this unless they expand...
Quote: “We’re thinking about how we can simplify the product even further. That’s what makes it different. [We're looking] for what can we ‘edit’ out.” He said. “These other products are adding services and we are trying to simplify ours down.” [1]
It's fun to do the popular comparison of Twitter vs. Facebook as well.
It's interesting to note that in terms of revenue, Facebook is pulling in around $5/user/year right now. But their valuation per user is around $114-$143 (currently $80-100 billion).
https://hackernews.hn/item?id=2969934
FB claims 700+million users, with 600million active.
Twitter claims 175million users but going by your metrics a much lower percentage are active.[1]
Given these numbers and a common metric of valuation over 5 years (and the assumption of no more user growth...I know it's not realistic but it makes the math easy), FB has to figure out how to multiply $25/user (over 5 years) by 4 to 6.
Twitter has a much steeper hill to climb to justify their valuation. Not only do they have less information about a user (so targeting advertising is harder), but FB has other methods of revenuing a user, online apps, games, etc. Twitter hasn't even proposed a revenue model outside of limited, randomly sampled, access to global tweet streams (which are likely not a major revenue driver in anybody's business plan) and recently announced paid forced tweets just showing up in people's streams (which I'm sure will go over well sarcasm).
To make matters worse, their experience doesn't really require people to come to their website. And it appears most activity is not via the site, so embedded adverts are going to be very hard.[2]
I can't figure out the math on this to be honest. Hell, I can't figure out the math on FB, but they look positively reasonable compared to Twitter.
[1] this article http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-how-many-use... uses follows as a metric for "active" but arrives at ballpark similar numbers.
[2] a little old but http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/04/15/twitter-reveals-7...