Ben Popper, for The Verge:
Investors didn’t buy it. Twitter was constantly compared to Facebook, though it failed to grow at Facebook’s speed or build a business quite as profitable. Twitter arguably has an equal or greater impact on current events and the global discourse, but many of the people who read tweets aren’t counted as active users and are therefore difficult to monetize.
As an official armchair investor and social media expert, I can’t help but wonder whether a new CEO interim-CEO iCEO will really help.
Ben Thompson said it best:
[Now that Twitter is a (struggling) public company, it is exceptionally difficult to see Wall Street having the patience for the amount of time such a strategy realignment would take. After all, it took the company nearly nine months to come up with its current strategy of being Yahoo-lite; how much longer to map out much less execute the sort of ambitious plan proposed here? Unfortunately, any credibility the company may have had with Wall Street is, after yesterday’s huge miss, surely gone
There’s no question Costolo in particular has done excellent work at Twitter, taking over a dysfunctional company with a brilliant product and building it up into an actual business, and I wouldn’t begrudge him a particularly large golden parachute.
Twitter will never be Facebook (thank goodness). And that’s not necessarily Costolo’s fault. Still, it seems like new leadership is a must in order to regain Wall Street’s support.
As Popper and many others have suggested, maybe Google is the answer?[1]
Seriously. ↩