Twitter jumped on Shark, now it looks like MySpace

Elon Musk has good reason to laugh at opponents predicting Twitter will collapse soon after he lays off half of the workforce. Critics say that without engineers to keep the platform running, the platform will collapse. Two months later, this social networking site still exists and may be growing.
However, its demise is still possible. Not because of a lack of talent to catch software bugs or keep servers running, but because maybe it’s time. Recent gimmicks include reinstating banned accounts, introducing blue checkmarks for all, and pseudo-democratic policy decisions. At first glance, none of this heralds impending doom, merely the whim of a billionaire showing off his new toy.

But history may show that this is the time musk jump shark. That term comes from the 1970s American sitcom Happy Days, which starred Henry Winkler as the leather jacket Fonzie and Ron Howard as the freckled-faced Richie Cunningham. At the time, the series was one of the top-rated shows on US television. By season five, however, its writers were desperate for new ideas, so they asked The Fonz to do a water ski jump over a shark. That episode, despite its ratings success, showed just how ridiculous the producers had become in their pursuit of attention.

The show continued for another six seasons, but audiences began to lose interest and its ratings plummeted. Shark Jump doesn’t kill Happy Days, but it does signal the highest levels of relevance and popularity.

Thirty years later, the same desperation can be seen on the faces and checkbooks of executives at News Corp. Eager to enter the new realm of internet social media, Rupert Murdoch’s multinational corporation in July 2005 spent US$580 million to take over MySpace.

At the time, MySpace had 16 million users, making it the fifth most visited website in the United States and the world’s leading social networking platform. Murdoch sees it as an opportunity to draw users to its other properties, including sites devoted to the Fox brand of news, sports, and movies. (Disclosure: Two years later, News Corp. bought Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, companies that compete with Bloomberg in the news and financial information markets.)

In addition to millions of users, this purchase gave Murdoch’s team what they desperately wanted: luxury. Instead of buying physical newspapers or following news programs on cable, young people of the time spent more time on computers writing their own content and sharing updates with friends. His humble origins in Adelaide, Australia, coupled with decades of working in London’s fierce journalism market, have made Murdoch rich and powerful, but that hasn’t made him cold. To do that, he turned to web wizards based in Los Angeles.

Although MySpace continues to grow, reaching 100 million global users a year later, it is losing its novel value to a startup in a Harvard University dorm room. In 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of web traffic.

Musk could learn a lot from Murdoch’s mistakes, though he probably won’t.

Eager to monetize MySpace and achieve a public goal of $1 billion in advertising revenue by 2008, News Corp. start delivering ads to website users. Tensions escalated between the site’s founders and the team Murdoch brought in to run it. Innovations aimed at making it more useful, such as cutting down on the number of pages loaded, have been stymied by the new owner’s desire to squeeze every penny out of the deal. Before long, it became clear that those who knew MySpace inside and out had been taken over by outsiders who had purchased it and wanted to claim the right to operate it as they wished.

Users are spending less and less time on MySpace and more time on Facebook. Years later, Murdoch himself realized that was the beginning of the end.

Musk’s predicament is no different.

After shelling out $47 billion, not all of it his own money, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive officer. and SpaceX financed the deal with $13 billion in debt claiming about $1.5 billion in annual interest. By comparison, Twitter announced $5 billion in revenue in 2021, with a net loss of $221 million and negative free cash flow of $379 million. The world’s second-richest man has little choice but to cash in on his new fortune quickly, unless he has to pay that debt himself.

However, Twitter’s challenges and downfall may have begun before Musk even made the half-baked offer in April. According to market researcher GWI, the site is trailing rivals Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and TikTok, with just 3.5% of global users considering it their favorite social media platform. .

Furthermore, more than 75% of Twitter’s audience are regular users of the major competitors’ platforms, but the same cannot be said – only 54% of Instagram users and 56% of TikTok users are also active. action on Twitter. If they get stuck, those on the blue-bird app have plenty of other places to land. In addition, it far exceeds the average usage time of just 5.5 hours per month globally, behind YouTube’s 23.4 hours and TikTok’s 22.9 hours, according to data compiled by HootSuite and We Are Social.

But perhaps the biggest worry is what Murdoch himself flagged.

While Musk’s attention-grabbing takeover has certainly drawn some new and more engaged fans, it may have been fleeting. In fact, average time spent on Twitter fell 15% in the third quarter of 2021 and 6% in the last three months of that year, not long before his takeover attracted more people, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. General Intelligence.

If that downtrend returns, as marketers and researchers predict, then Twitter has peaked. There can be times when stunts and one-off events draw people back. But it’s only so often that a teen activist can teach a muscular bald guy, or the site’s owner can run a ostentatious poll.

The rest of the time, Twitter has a good chance of slowly slipping into disuse — like a guy in a leather jacket jumping into a shark.