In advance, please excuse the tone of this response: I am angry at the company and the industry you are defending, not really at the human who I'm responding to, but I cannot summon the energy right now to go back through this any more times and to keep stripping out the vitriol while retaining the intent.
> I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.
Cool, hi.
> Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does.
half-truth; engagement in the aggregate does not pay the bills alone, but advertisers pay for people to see sponsored tweets, and more people see the sponsored tweets if more people are online for more time, and more people are online for more time if engagement is higher, so... engagement in the aggregate does in fact pay the bills.
> Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales.
false; this is a nice rosy image of advertisers as rational actors operating with perfect information that is not at all realistic.
If an advertisement performs poorly, who is to blame: twitter? the ad copywriter? a graphic designer? the product's dev team? A product owner? The marketer who made a buy on some specific targeting segment? Their manager? The guy who hired those two? The CMO? The CEO? Marketing teams get fired constantly, almost annually, but very few firms are ever going to all-out stop advertising on social media platforms on the basis of poor conversion on their ads, because they cannot know for certain that it's not their fault, and they have to keep playing the game even if it is rigged.
The thinking here is easy to comprehend: "Walmart is still doing it... so we must be doing it wrong."
> Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on.
again, false. Advertisers do this all the time, because they're cargo-cult following buffoons and there's money sloshing around fucking everywhere.
Advertising money gets laundered, advertising money greases wheels, advertising money gets used by incompetents and people's nephews and rapacious over-confident investors who are running their own little schemes, and a billion other things, and it even occasionally gets used by savvy nerds who come to suspect it isn't actually working, but I assert: most advertisers will repeatedly pay for a lot of dumb shit that does not work at all. Always has been.
> Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations.
This is an interesting academic distinction and I'm sure you know more about specific content -> behaviour readouts than I do, but the theory is simple: more time online results in more impressions and more impressions yields more conversions. Not a higher rate, mind you: just. more.
It does not really matter why or when or how we see the words "coca cola". All that matters is that we see those words more. Every day, more times per day, more places, more people. We need to be thinking about them always.
That is what they're paying for, and it doesn't even have to make sense! That might not even get them anything, but they have more money than they can possibly spend, so they may as well spend it on trying to get us to look at and think about them.
Can it be more optimal? Could you squeeze blood from this stone? Sure, probably, but whether I'm on twitter reading great video-game recommendations or reading flame wars is a pittance compared to whether I'm online or not at all.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the optimal situation is to make users cycle in and out of the outrage content: get me mad so I stick around a bit longer, cool me down with something funny/sweet, then show me an ad, then get me mad again. Repeat.
> Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform.
this is absurd. It's absurd! It really makes me question your intent and good faith.
The platform is designed to be used, by definition! What, are you telling us twitter does not want its users online? You're saying that engagement is "expensive", is twitter running some kind of other service? Something outside of users looking at and posting tweets? This is nonsensical to the point of being upsetting.
It is like Philip Morris fretting over all the tobacco they're going to have to pay to harvest so that people can keep smoking. If only they didn't have to! You made an advertising platform and people must be present on it to be advertised to. End of story.
Now, of course, there are costs to be optimized. A dumb example: if you know you can't show me an ad between now and when I will naturally end my session, you should maybe try to get me offline right now, before I download any more video data, but that stuff is just sand on the beach for the difference it makes.
Maybe you think this matters because it is the work you do, or it's work you know does get done, but it does not matter in the big picture.
Side-rant: Twitter could fire 95% of its employees tomorrow and probably be more profitable than it is today in the long term, but it won't, again because of cargo cults and social wisdom.
Almost none of the feature work that has been done by twitter in the last 8+ years has materially mattered: the product is done, and you're mostly paid to arrange deck chairs on a ship that's sailing along smoothly and to look pretty. Employee headcount, profit, ad impressions: at the end of the day, all of this is just disembodied marketing metrics for investors to speculate on and to try to extract cash from before the whole thing tanks out someday.
> Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads).
This recap of your argument is just a rehash, but it restates the basic flawed premise in full:
"Advertisers are rational and have perfect information and will pay only for the optimal conversion strategy up to the optimal point of cost/benefit, so if we ever over or under-shoot at all, we'd lose money and we'd go right out of business!"
So, let me recap as well:
- Twitter is an advertisement platform.
- Twitter relies on dollars spent by advertisers. We agree so far, I think.
- Advertisers pay both per impression and per click.
- Advertisers have bad information, and act on social wisdom as much as or more than anything else. They cannot evaluate your performance by how well their advertisements do on your platform. This right here is the secret sauce!
- Engagement (i.e. time spent paying attention to the platform) may not raise conversion rates, (i.e. clicks per impression), but higher engagement is strongly correlated with more conversion overall. People gotta be online.
- Engagement is the core metric of your business.
To put this all very simply: if I am on twitter all day, it's a hell of a lot more time for me to run into and to think about Harry's Razors than if I never went on there at all.
That is the product you are selling to advertisers, and they will pay for it for a long time, even if it doesn't really make any sense or money.
> I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.
Cool, hi.
> Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does.
half-truth; engagement in the aggregate does not pay the bills alone, but advertisers pay for people to see sponsored tweets, and more people see the sponsored tweets if more people are online for more time, and more people are online for more time if engagement is higher, so... engagement in the aggregate does in fact pay the bills.
> Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales.
false; this is a nice rosy image of advertisers as rational actors operating with perfect information that is not at all realistic.
If an advertisement performs poorly, who is to blame: twitter? the ad copywriter? a graphic designer? the product's dev team? A product owner? The marketer who made a buy on some specific targeting segment? Their manager? The guy who hired those two? The CMO? The CEO? Marketing teams get fired constantly, almost annually, but very few firms are ever going to all-out stop advertising on social media platforms on the basis of poor conversion on their ads, because they cannot know for certain that it's not their fault, and they have to keep playing the game even if it is rigged.
The thinking here is easy to comprehend: "Walmart is still doing it... so we must be doing it wrong."
> Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on.
again, false. Advertisers do this all the time, because they're cargo-cult following buffoons and there's money sloshing around fucking everywhere.
Advertising money gets laundered, advertising money greases wheels, advertising money gets used by incompetents and people's nephews and rapacious over-confident investors who are running their own little schemes, and a billion other things, and it even occasionally gets used by savvy nerds who come to suspect it isn't actually working, but I assert: most advertisers will repeatedly pay for a lot of dumb shit that does not work at all. Always has been.
> Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations.
This is an interesting academic distinction and I'm sure you know more about specific content -> behaviour readouts than I do, but the theory is simple: more time online results in more impressions and more impressions yields more conversions. Not a higher rate, mind you: just. more.
It does not really matter why or when or how we see the words "coca cola". All that matters is that we see those words more. Every day, more times per day, more places, more people. We need to be thinking about them always.
That is what they're paying for, and it doesn't even have to make sense! That might not even get them anything, but they have more money than they can possibly spend, so they may as well spend it on trying to get us to look at and think about them.
Can it be more optimal? Could you squeeze blood from this stone? Sure, probably, but whether I'm on twitter reading great video-game recommendations or reading flame wars is a pittance compared to whether I'm online or not at all.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the optimal situation is to make users cycle in and out of the outrage content: get me mad so I stick around a bit longer, cool me down with something funny/sweet, then show me an ad, then get me mad again. Repeat.
> Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform.
this is absurd. It's absurd! It really makes me question your intent and good faith.
The platform is designed to be used, by definition! What, are you telling us twitter does not want its users online? You're saying that engagement is "expensive", is twitter running some kind of other service? Something outside of users looking at and posting tweets? This is nonsensical to the point of being upsetting.
It is like Philip Morris fretting over all the tobacco they're going to have to pay to harvest so that people can keep smoking. If only they didn't have to! You made an advertising platform and people must be present on it to be advertised to. End of story.
Now, of course, there are costs to be optimized. A dumb example: if you know you can't show me an ad between now and when I will naturally end my session, you should maybe try to get me offline right now, before I download any more video data, but that stuff is just sand on the beach for the difference it makes.
Maybe you think this matters because it is the work you do, or it's work you know does get done, but it does not matter in the big picture.
Side-rant: Twitter could fire 95% of its employees tomorrow and probably be more profitable than it is today in the long term, but it won't, again because of cargo cults and social wisdom.
Almost none of the feature work that has been done by twitter in the last 8+ years has materially mattered: the product is done, and you're mostly paid to arrange deck chairs on a ship that's sailing along smoothly and to look pretty. Employee headcount, profit, ad impressions: at the end of the day, all of this is just disembodied marketing metrics for investors to speculate on and to try to extract cash from before the whole thing tanks out someday.
> Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads).
This recap of your argument is just a rehash, but it restates the basic flawed premise in full:
"Advertisers are rational and have perfect information and will pay only for the optimal conversion strategy up to the optimal point of cost/benefit, so if we ever over or under-shoot at all, we'd lose money and we'd go right out of business!"
So, let me recap as well:
- Twitter is an advertisement platform.
- Twitter relies on dollars spent by advertisers. We agree so far, I think.
- Advertisers pay both per impression and per click.
- Advertisers have bad information, and act on social wisdom as much as or more than anything else. They cannot evaluate your performance by how well their advertisements do on your platform. This right here is the secret sauce!
- Engagement (i.e. time spent paying attention to the platform) may not raise conversion rates, (i.e. clicks per impression), but higher engagement is strongly correlated with more conversion overall. People gotta be online.
- Engagement is the core metric of your business.
To put this all very simply: if I am on twitter all day, it's a hell of a lot more time for me to run into and to think about Harry's Razors than if I never went on there at all.
That is the product you are selling to advertisers, and they will pay for it for a long time, even if it doesn't really make any sense or money.