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Comment by BerislavLopac | Hacker News Reader

> 3. New news.

For this one, I would definitely say Twitter. As an example, my first info about the recent school shooting in Florida was a tweet by a scared student. Anything that happens anywhere in the world will spread on Twitter literally in an instant, and the same goes for non-realtime content published elsewhere.

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I am not sure Twitter is "new news". It's like saying "everybody screaming at once about everything they want is the new opera". Surely, among that screaming there would be opera singers, and among Twitter noise there would be news. But Twitter is not news. Maybe something that could be used as raw source for "new news". There are several projects aimed at that, but mostly very National-Enquirer-like kind of news (more looking to shock and entertain than to deliver information).

And yet from a business perspective, Twitter is doing terribly. The news platforms we seem to gravitate to don't end up being profitable.

Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M. What’s your definition of a business failure?

Twitter is profitable as of 2 weeks ago, and with just $91M in profits. Let's wait and see where this ship goes over the next 2-3 years before claiming victory.

Twitter has wracked up 2.5B in losses over like 11 years. Only now have they turned a profit. That is a failure in the time frame of its existence. http://time.com/4241716/twitter-losses-twtr/

Twitter is almost certainly worth more today than their historical losses, making them a success.

Is it? The opportunity cost of that $2.5B is what to compare to. You could have acquired instagram for half that, for example.

Is Twitter now profitable? It was my understanding that throughout all of 2016 and 207 they were operating at a loss. And for a long time before that. If they're profitable this year it could be a turning point and I'd be wrong, at least going forward. But do we have enough data to support it at this point?

Let me Google that for you...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/twitter-q4-2017-earnings-rev...

So... a simple yes would have sufficed. They were not profitable, now they are. They may not be later, we'll find out.

You were already told they were profitable, in fact it was the comment you were replying to:

  "Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M".

What more did you need?

Fundamentally, we refuse to pay for content. As long as we continue to do so, they won't be profitable.

The issue is that we also complain about the dumbing down of online info, and decry the lack of quality content.

The advertising model does not work for valuable content creation. Period. Until someone figures out what its replacement is, news (and all non mass-produced content) will continue to slowly die online.

Some people, myself included, pay for some online news content. But just by virtue of being paid doesn't make news content creators more valuable. I had a NYT subscription until their OpEd board started churning out Nazi apoliga like it was their job. The world of paid content is still pretty terrible and stuck carrying water for their corporate overlords just as much as ad-supported groups. Maybe that's the future, but if all it took for quality to go up was for paid subscriptions to exist and people to want to buy them, it would have happened by now.

Do you happen to know what Quartz's business model is (qz.com)? They seem to have no subscription model to pay for even if you want to, nor do they seem to serve ads (as far as I've noticed, but maybe they serve a few), and yet they seem to have decent quality content.

They are a subsidiary of Atlantic Media Group that are explicitly advertised as no pay walls, no registration, and no app downloads:

https://www.atlanticmedia.com/brands/quartz/

Atlantic Media is owned by David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs invested in The Atlantic recently (but I think all of the subsidiaries are still owned solely by Bradley).

Before he was in media, he founded and sold a few advisory companies that went public, where he made a few hundred million dollars. So I guess Quartz's business model is live off the largesse of very wealthy benefactors?

Oh wow, thank you! It very much did remind me of The Atlantic -- makes sense now!

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