The art of brevity
Twitter has made some 336 people redundant, mainly in the product and engineering teams. There’s little doubt that Twitter has played an important part in helping media organisations push news stories to readers, but the company has struggled to turn its mass appeal into real income.
It’s difficult to see an easy fix, given that the root of the problem lies in the very format that has made Twitter so popular. Limiting each tweet to just 140 characters helped concentrate each message into the most essential elements. Adding URLs and images has enhanced this, but there’s no room for anything superfluous like advertising.
This of course sums up the problem facing many publishers now – people want the media, and they want it to be free, but they don’t want the advertising that has hitherto paid for much of the media that we consume. The challenge for Twitter, and for many of us who work in media, is to find a different business model.
Leave a Reply