> I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed.
Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.
This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
Their stock would have done better had they done this long ago.
Their massive headcount is mostly just a drain on profitability, and very hard to argue there's much value add.
Certainly infra, data science etc takes headcount, but last I heard Twitter has hundreds or thousands of product devs and their product has had close to 0 changes in the last 5 years. What do these people do all day, really?
I mean, they are flat from their 2013 IPO, while basically every other tech has rocketed.
Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.