After a six-year stint filled with shaking fistfuls over bad news and political tweets on business performance, the departure of Jack Dorsey as Twitter’s head was cheered by investors, as seen in gains in its stock market. On Monday, the co-founder of this micro-blog platform resigned to focus solely on his fintech venture, Square, handing over the leadership of Twitter to 37-year-old Parag Agarwal, its former tech chief. , whose job now will be to expand shareholder value, which has clearly lagged behind the dizzying pace of its peers in this booming sector. The succession itself produced a relatively ambiguous reaction, with observers looking for a strategic turnaround unsure whether an internal pick could pull it off. A PhD from Stanford and an IIT Bombay graduate, Agarwal has had Twitter technology since 2017. Importantly, he also has the backing of Dorsey, 45, who remains on its board. “My faith in Parag as Twitter CEO is deep,” he said, “his work over the past 10 years has been transformative. I am so grateful for his skill, heart and soul. It is time for him to lead. “
Agarwal’s success, as we must note amidst our applause for his remarkable climb, is yet to be ascertained and will be determined entirely by how well he tackles a difficult task. As a business, Twitter Inc. is in need of a big boost. Activist investors have been restless for several quarters. Unable to monetize its user base enough or grow it fast enough to keep up with ad-revenue hogs like Google and Meta, Twitter’s performance has flagged on several fronts. The growth curve of its original platform has been slammed by critics for its flatness, with efforts to increase the appeal of its service falling mostly flat. The primary tool for enabling tweet searches and editing or retracting these short messages has long been kept out of free-user reach, even though its most recent pay version received a weak response and opened up to new social-spaces. In its external playback venture media players—think video and voice—have made slow progress. In early 2021, Twitter had set a target of nearly doubling its annual revenue to $7.5 billion by 2023, with its user base expected to grow at an annual average clip of about 20% over three years. Its last count was reported a notch above 210 million daily users. Only a tenth of them are believed to live in India, where it remains largely an upscale platform, unlike WhatsApp, which is largely used. This difference can be partly explained by Twitter’s lack of ‘network effect’: since tweeted messages are open to everyone online, no one should sign up just to be in the loop of a social circuit. , which is an advantage given that closed networks are capitalized one after the other. point of inevitable dominance.
Although it acts as a host for user interaction, Twitter also serves as a webcast platform, with some tweets going viral to reach the faceless crowd beyond ‘followers’. Not only does this make it harder to broaden its base, but it places more responsibility on Twitter for its social impact. To the extent it lends itself as a megaphone to mob violence, examples of which have emerged recently in both the US and Indian capitals, it must deploy all resources to foolproof the moderation of its content needed. It may be unable to escape accusations of liberal bias, which any private firm has the right to exercise, but with our rules for social media being stringent, it is held accountable not as an intermediary, but as a publisher. Will have to be Overall, it’s hard to envy Twitter’s hot seat right now.
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