Updated: January 28, 2017
I wrote a piece and recorded a podcast in August 2016 about how Twitter appears to be stuck, and arguing for ways in which it could unstick itself. Twitter is stuck in a couple of different ways at this point – both in terms of user growth, which has been anemic over the past year, and in terms of its product, which isn’t evolving nearly quickly enough to make it more attractive to either power users or the more mainstream users it needs to attract in order to grow.
Jack Dorsey is running two companies at once, but also seems determined to own product at Twitter, creating a paradox where he doesn’t have the time needed to fix product, but also squeezes out others who could help, hence the recent exodus of executives. I continue to believe that Twitter won’t grow its user base meaningfully unless it can let go of its obsession with account-based following and move towards something more user friendly based on topics. The on boarding process is too complex and leaves users with very little sense of how compelling Twitter can be when it’s working well, and so Twitter has an enormously high abandonment rate for new users.
2017 will be a pivotal year in Twitter’s history – Jack Dorsey came in as CEO with promises to fix a number of key issues, but has since shifted his focus almost entirely to live video. This leaves the new user experience, Twitter’s abuse problem, complex syntax, and a host of other user-facing issues unsolved, while also leaving Twitter’s advertiser and analytics shortcomings unresolved. The live video bet is a big one, but it’s unclear at this point whether it will pay off in terms of either increased ad revenue (given that much of the content comes with ads served by others) or better user engagement. Jack Dorsey arguably has this year to prove that his vision for the company is the right one, and that it can deliver growth in users or at least meaningful revenue growth and progress towards profitability. If it doesn’t, I suspect Dorsey won’t last the year.