Twitter, the metaverse that has been
For all of it's faults, Twitter provides enormous value for content creators
It’s been a busy couple of weeks so my apologies about the lack of updates:
The Update:
The tremendous amount of focus that the “metaverse” is now garnering has left me wondering exactly what direction the social commerce and creator economy is headed. While I have generally been a fairly large critic of Twitter, primarily because its inability to capitalise on its vast opportunity set, there is no doubt that it provides enormous value to it’s users. I think about the value that it provides to its users in two ways:
It gives an enormous megaphone to those users who provide, and curate, excellent content. Tangentially, the audience that they cultivate can be directly monetised.
Consumers of content get access to expert opinion (experts who get that status via acknowledgement by their peers, not via credentials), amazing content, and have the ability to directly interact almost all other users.
Twitter contrasts with the likes of the Meta family of apps in that it provides enormous value to its users (for example as a recruiting tool, and even a lead-gen engine for real estate and private equity deals) but captures only a minute portion of that value. The value that Meta provides is monetised first, users reap nothing monetarily, and the business customers capture another portion.
The fact that twitter has been so underdeveloped speaks volume about the value that it creates. It operates so effectively across almost every niche interest group, internet based or not. To invert, only such a compelling product could withstand an absentee CEO, constant plundering of the investor base, and product velocity that has only picked up marginally after shareholder activism. Ironically, its underdeveloped ad-tech probably made it more robust to the changes made by Apples’s iOS 14 update.
While Zuckberg has been riffing off the idea that the next generation of social applications will be ‘immersive’, I’m still wandering about how engaging they will be. This is where I want to tie in the Twitter users experience. Twitter is an extremely powerful engagement machine. People use the app compulsively because you could literally spend 24 hours purely focused on the 1 or 2 interests that you are most interested in. In a pre-internet world one may have had extremely niche interests that you would only seldom get to engage in with another interested user. Now you can access this at will.
Strangely enough, some of the best experiences on Twitter are experienced between two people who are intentionally hiding their identity. Often the lowest quality exchanges are between people who are defending their public identity. I use the platform because you can access unadulterated information, not because I want to consume polished media narratives.
On the other side of this take is that Twitter is a platform for relatively narrow appeal, and mostly for the reasons I mentioned before. The broadly appealing social apps are those that capture real identity, Facebook Blue being the best example.
As far as the creator economy, and social commerce, Twitter stands out because despite of any features to do, almost any domain expertise can be monetised on it, and often for free. Twitter primarily feeds off onto other services that then capture this value - Substack, OnlyFans, independent blogs, Discord etc. This ecosystem that allows for independent creators to make a significant living, largely via Twitter’s platform, is quite different from the Meta family of apps, Google, and Snapchat. Valuable content on these channels drives engagement, which ultimately drives advertising spend. One doesn’t need to build an audience on Facebook to capture value from it.
Zuckerberg and Meta have begun to move in this direction, and it is an opportunity. It is very debatable how large the market opportunity is for this, but when done correctly - how I would of like Twitter to go about it - I think the longevity of the opportunity could be immense. You simply don’t need to worry about competition (that much) when you operate a platform, which is positive sum, as opposed to an engagement ad optimisation negative sum game which Facebook and Instagram are engaged in now. Tik Tok is now winning that game, but I dare say they will in turn be supplanted.