Twitter has a joke about Twitter that goes like this: The biggest innovation the company achieved after spending more than $3 billion on research and development (R&D) over the past five years was the character of a tweet. was doubling the count. The characterization isn’t quite fair, but there’s enough truth in it to make it funny.
Faced with such criticism, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this year promised a different mindset. At the company’s analyst day in February, he vowed that Twitter would “double growth velocity” of features to achieve its long-term financial goals. The message was clear: Twitter was on a new course, led by rapid-fire innovation and game-changing product roll-outs.
how is it going so far? The early returns are in, and it turns out that many people are still using Twitter the same way they did five years ago. Unless the social-media platform radically rethinks how it develops products, that may not change anytime soon.
Last week, TechCrunch reported that Twitter’s much-anticipated Super Follow program, which enables users to charge a monthly fee for subscriber-only content, generated negligible revenue in its first two weeks of operation. According to app research firm Sensor Tower, during that time US consumers spent a total of $6,000 for Twitter in-app iOS purchases.
The company has emphasized that it is working with only a small group of creators to improve that offering before a wider roll-out, but from data from its hand-picked group of 77 popular accounts. This indicates that demand so far has been very limited. This is troubling for Twitter because Super Follows was the centerpiece of the product road map that got investors most excited. He hoped this would be the beginning of a company that would find new ways to make money beyond advertising.
The anemic debut of Super Followers follows a series of offerings that haven’t started yet. After Twitter unveiled its Tip Jar payment feature in May, security researchers discovered potential privacy issues that should have been caught in its testing phase. About a month later, the company released its first paid subscription offering, called Twitter Blue, which allows users to organize saved tweets into folders, gain access to color themes, and post appearance of up to 30 seconds for potential revision. allows delay. . That product is still undergoing testing, but mostly promises to appeal to some power users. And finally, Twitter shut down its knockoff version of Fleets, Instagram Stories, and Snapchat Stories just a few months after launch.
Except for its new live-audio feature Twitter Spaces, which is seeing some success for major accounts, the company doesn’t seem to know exactly what its users want or need. Instead, it seems to offer a little bit of everything. The company’s latest befledding experiment is a format change to the main app feed that will look like Reddit’s design. It’s like Twitter is throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Twitter’s head of consumer products, Kayvan Bekpor, has said that the company is deliberately trying to instill a taste for “terrible, ambitious bets.” The wind is being drawn, “We’re not taking chances big enough.” The company has also pointed to a host of new features over the past year — in addition to Spaces, there’s ticketed locations, communities, safety modes, newsletters, and more — as evidence of its accelerated innovation.
But so far, none of this has reduced the frustration for Twitter enthusiasts like me. I love service and believe it has immense potential. With a properly crafted list of ‘follows’, logging on can be like plugging in a matrix of brilliant ideas from the world’s smartest people.
Still, the company has failed to listen to its most ardent supporters, who have been battling over the basic features for years, including direct message content search, a more advanced version of Tweetdeck, better analytics, and an edit button. We are still waiting.
Perhaps most puzzlingly, Twitter CEO Dorsey also runs Square Inc., a fintech powerhouse that has created hit product after hit product and disrupted many industries. Indeed, its merchant point-of-sale system and cash payment app is known for its smart intuitive design and best-in-class user experience.
If only Dorsey could figure out a way to bring some of the magic of that product to his other company.
Tae Kim is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.
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