“The largest information network in the world”: Prepare to hear that phrase out of the mouth of TwitterCEO Dick Costolo a lot in the coming months. Costolo and his fellow executives used it four or five times on Tuesday’s second-quarter earnings call, signaling a shift in how they want the rest of the world to think about Twitter. It’s a formulation that delicately skirts the line between social network and media company, conferring the advantages of each.
For months, Twitter has been struggling with the perhaps unreasonable expectation of investors that its growth curve resemble that of Facebook. This is a significant problem, as its acquisition of monthly active users has been slowing down, meaning it could be decades, not years, before it accrues the 1.3 billion Facebook has now.
Costolo’s solution is to tell everyone we’ve been counting wrong. The 271 million MAUs Twitter announced today (itself marking a comfortable jump of 16 million from the previous quarter’s mark) only comprise one segment of Twitter’s audience.
There’s also the secondary audience of “logged out” unique visitors to Twitter profile pages, and the tertiary one of “syndicated” viewers who see tweets embedded on third-party websites, or projected on a TV screen, or in the many other places they turn up. “Twitter is everywhere. It’s all over TV,” Costolo said on the earnings call. “Those users come to Twitter looking for the content they’re told is happening and unfolding on Twitter right now, and obviously, from the numbers we’re seeing, lots of them decide not to log in.”
Count all those people up and you get a total of two to three times the size of that 271 million MAUs, he claimed. “We will position ourselves to reach the largest audience in the world and every person on the planet,” he said.
What is Twitter willing to do to get there? For starters, it’s willing to count as part of its audience people it’s making no money from. Right now, logged-out and syndicated users don’t see any ads, and that’s not going to change soon, said Costolo. No wonder: Twitter knows far less about the people in those outer rings than about its logged-in users, making it hard to target ads to them. But Costolo insisted there are nonetheless “frequently tremendous signals” about their interests and behaviors that will “eventually” make them a valuable part of its user base.
It’s also willing to tinker with the core of what makes Twitter Twitter: its strict reverse-chronological organization. Right now, every user’s timeline consists of every tweet (plus or minus replies, depending on one’s toggle setting) by every user he or she follows. Asked whether Twitter would consider a version of timeline that uses an algorithm, a la Facebook’s Newsfeed, to determine which tweets get promoted and which get suppressed, Costolo said, “It’s fair to say we’re not ruling out any changes in product in service to bridging the gap between signing up for the service and receiving immediate value.”
In other words, to overtake Facebook, Twitter is even willing to become Facebook.
