As many of you know, I’ve been a big advocate of the twitter platform from day 1, having established by handle there in 2009 and used it to grow the overall traffic of iBankcoin with great success.
It’s worth noting, traffic coming into IBC is up 150% year over year from Twitter. Many of our Exodus members found us through Twitter. Purely from an operational perspective, Twitter is the single best news platform in the world. So, having said all that, how in the world are advertisers not chomping at the bit to reserve ads there?
I can only offer my personal experience there as a testimonial to the fact that the company is being managed by a bearded baboon.
RBC Capital downgraded Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) from Sector Perform to Underperform with a price target of $14.00 (from $17.00).
Analyst Mark Mahaney commented, “This change is based on our belief that Twitter’s value proposition to advertisers could be waning, based on our recent advertiser survey data. We note that we still believe Twitter is a unique asset with a strong value proposition to core users.”
The analyst listed the following data points on TWTR from a survey of 1,100 advertising professionals:
26% of respondents plan to “significantly” or “modestly” increase their Twitter ad spend vs. 28% who intend to decrease – this is the weakest result we have seen and the first time we have seen a negative skew towards spending.
30% of our survey respondents do not allocate any budget to the Twitter platform, up from 25% in February. And the % who are committing 1%-10% (an experimental level, perhaps) of their Online market budget with Twitter decreased to 54% from 57% last time. Further, we found response rates to bigger Twitter advertising commitments (11% or greater) to be somewhat low, and decreased slightly to 16% from 17% in February and 18% last year.
Only 24% of respondents believe their ROI has improved on the platform versus 21% who think it declined (a negative move from the 29% vs. 21% split seen earlier this year)
When ranked against its peers, Twitter ranked 5th of 7 in terms of ROI to advertisers, behind Google, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, but ahead of Yahoo and AOL
Mahaney’s broad concerns on TWTR are: 1) It’s not clear when/if product/UI changes can stabilize or reaccelerate User & Usage. 2) Channel checks and our last 4 surveys (and particularly our most recent referenced above) don’t provide convincing evidence that a substantial number of advertisers will commit meaningful $s to TWTR.
Without question, RBC is right. If it weren’t for the specter of an imminent buyout by a number of media conglomerates, Twitter’s share price would be appreciable lower.
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As a twtr shareholder….. what is twitter ?
Garbage people are afraid to short
NFL on TWTR is pretty sweet though.
So I’ve heard. It seems to be the one good strategy for growth that their C-suite has has accomplished.
Who the hell wants to watch foolsball on a phone?
You can Chromecast it to your teevee
Young people who don’t own TVs anymore. Ipad, Phones, etc.
I love my $TWTR stock. It gives me a good, cathartic cry every time I go over my portfolio.
$4! Did one of the Fast Money guys say sell TWTR and buy back at $4!!!!!! It can’t be that bad. Why sell at a loss? Might as well keep it and ride it down to ground zero a la Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.
maybe he meant $4 gap up gain this morning?
Maybe. I was only half listening and he was talking fast. I could swear I heard the word “sell” which isn’t necessarily the right advice for everyone but if you are a day or swing trader it is more likely.
A $4 gap up isn’t much help to me, only brings my unrealized loss to 20%. I’ll wait. Yeehoo!