About Twitter, in the English version of Wikipedia I read: “Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets per day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the 10 most visited websites and has been described as the SMS (Short Message Service) of the Internet. At the beginning of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users.
According to datareportal.com, an analysis of kepios.com indicates that the number of users in January this year was 465 million.
Curiously, during none of its almost 16 years of life has it reported profits.
These are the income and losses it recorded each year, from 2010 to 2021 in millions of dollars:
2010 – Income: 28; Losses: 67.
2011 – Income: 106; Losses: 164.
2012 – Income: 317; Losses: 79.
2013 – Income: 665; Losses: 645.
2014 – Income: 1,403; Losses: 578.
2015 – Income: 2,218; Losses: 521.
2016 – Income: 2,530; Losses: 457.
2017 – Income: 2,443; Losses: 108.
2018 – Income: 3,042; Losses: 1,206.
2019 – Income: 3,459; Losses: 1,466.
2020 – Income: 3,716; Losses: 1,136.
2021 – Income: 5,077; Losses: 221.
Total from 2010 to 2021 – Earnings: 25,004; Losses: 6648.
This is the company that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is going to buy for 44,000 million dollars with the idea that only he can turn it around and turn it into a profitable business.
Many analysts believe that not even he will be able to do it, among them several of those who disqualified him when in 2004 he invested 6.5 million dollars in Tesla Motors in order to become the majority shareholder of the company founded in 2003. Today Tesla is the leading company in the manufacture of electric cars and a major player in the renewable energy sector.
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter will face formidable competition within the social media segment. Thirteen of them have more than Twitter’s 465 million monthly users.
For starters, there are the four platforms owned by Meta: Facebook (2.912 million users), WhatsApp (2 billion), Instagram (1.452 million), Messenger (1 billion). Total: 7.364 million users.
Then there’s YouTube, owned by Google, with 2.562 million.
They are followed by the Chinese WeChat (1,268 million), TikTok (1,000 million), Douyin (613 million), Kuaishou (578 million), Sina Weibo (573 million) and QQ (552 million).
Snapchat has 589 million monthly users and Telegram with 550 million.
Of the 17 social platforms with the most users in the world, Twitter is number 14 and is only above Pinterest (431 million), Reddit (430 million) and Quora (300 million).
Musk is a genius for business, just like Apple’s Steve Jobs was. And if Jobs made mistakes, Musk likely will too. Perhaps Twitter is one of them.
Only time will tell if the South African was wrong or not.
Facebook: Eduardo J Ruiz-Healy
Instagram: ruizhealy
Place: ruizhealytimes.com
Journalist and producer
guest column
Opinionist, columnist, lecturer, media trainer, 35 years of experience in the media, microentrepreneur.