Elon Musk has good reason to laugh at naysayers who predicted that Twitter would crash as soon as he laid off half his workforce. Critics opined that the platform would collapse if the engineers didn’t keep it up. Two months later, the social media site is still alive and may even be growing.
But its demise is still possible. It’s not because we don’t have enough people to find software bugs or keep servers running, but maybe the time has come. Recent gimmicks include reviving banned accounts, introducing blue checks for everyone, and quasi-democratic policy making. At first glance, nothing signals impending doom, just the whim of a billionaire showing off his new toy.
But history may point to this as the moment Musk jumped off a shark. The term originates from the 1970s American sitcom Happy Days, which starred Henry Winkler as Fonzie in Leather His Jacket and Ron Howard as the freckled Richie Cunningham. At the time, the series was one of the top ranked shows on US television. By season five, however, its writers were desperate for new ideas, so they had Fontz water ski jump over a shark. It showed how it turned into a farce.
The show ran for six more seasons, but audiences began to lose interest and ratings plummeted. indicates that
Thirty years later, the same despair was on the faces and checks of News Corp executives. InternetHe was eager to enter the hip new sphere of media. Rupert Murdoch’s multinational conglomerate spent his $580 million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005. bottom.
At the time, MySpace had 16 million users, making it the fifth most visited website in the United States and the world’s premier social networking platform. Murdoch saw this as an opportunity to direct users to his other properties, including his website for Fox-branded news, sports and movies. (Disclosure: Two years later, News Corporation acquired Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, which compete with Bloomberg in the financial news and information market).
Beyond millions of users, the purchase gave Murdoch’s team what they craved: chic. I spent a lot of time on my computer creating my own content and sharing updates with my friends instead of watching His humble roots in Adelaide, Australia, combined with decades in the tough London newspaper market, made Murdoch wealthy and powerful, but it didn’t cool him down. turned to his Los Angeles-based web wizard.
MySpace continued to grow, reaching 100 million users worldwide a year later, but it was losing its novelty value to hip startups emerging from Harvard dorm rooms. In 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in his web traffic.
Musk could learn a lot from Murdoch’s mistakes, but probably not.
Eager to monetize MySpace and reach its goal of $1 billion in ad revenue by 2008, News Corp. began forcing ads to users of the site. Tensions grew between the website’s founders and the team Murdoch brought in to run it. Ruined by the new owner’s desire to squeeze out every penny. It soon became clear that people who knew MySpace inside and out were usurped by outsiders who wanted to buy MySpace and claim the right to run it as they please.
Users spent less and less time on MySpace and more time on Facebook. Years later, Murdoch himself recognized it as the beginning of the end.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO to fund deal with $13 billion in debt that will pay out $47 billion (all not his own money) and require interest payments of about $1.5 billion annually provided. By comparison, Twitter posted his $5 billion in revenue in 2021 with a net loss of $221 million and negative free cash flow of his $379 million. His second-richest man in the world has little choice but to rush to monetize his new property.
But Twitter’s challenge and demise may have begun before Musk made a middling bid in April. According to market research firm GWI, the site trails his rivals Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and TikTok, and is named as their favorite social media platform by just 3.5% of global users.
Additionally, more than 75% of Twitter’s audience are regulars on major rival platforms, while 54% of Instagram and 56% of TikTok users are also active on Twitter. If the push hits, users of the Bluebird app have plenty of other places to land. and only 5.5 hours per month are spent on average globally.
But perhaps the biggest concern is what Murdoch himself pointed out.
Musk’s high-profile acquisition has undoubtedly attracted some new fans and more engagement, but that may be fleeting. Average hours decreased by 15% in the third quarter of 2021 and by 6% in the last three months of the year.
If that downward trend reemerges, as marketers and researchers predict, Twitter has already peaked. A stunt or he may be pulled back by a one-time event. But very few teenage activists can educate bald muscles or site owners can run gimmicky polls.
The rest of the time, Twitter has a good chance of slowly becoming irrelevant — like a man in a leather jacket jumping on a shark.
Tim Culpan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. He previously covered technology in his Bloomberg news.
Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg and is published under a special syndication agreement.
