Aug 17th, 2012
The Hand That Feeds
My life changed on April 9, 2010. At least, my work life did. And when you own your own business, your work life tends to bleed — heavily — into every aspect of your life. So when I received the announcement early on a Friday evening that Twitter had purchased atebits, it was a punch to the gut.
Backstory
Let me go back one year, to April of 2009. Tweetie on the iPhone was a smashing success. I’d read the likes of Gruber sing its praises, but hadn’t gotten around to trying it. I think I was using Twitterrific most of the time (which included ads from the Deck).
Meanwhile, Michael Mistretta and I were doing everything we could to build up Fusion Ads, our relatively young (5 months) boutique advertising service. When we received an email from Loren Brichter asking if we’d be interested in putting our ads in his soon to be released Tweetie for Mac, we were excited. It was then that I finally picked up Tweetie on the iPhone and realized the genius that it was (which is what makes it so hard to watch Twitter flush that genius down the investor-backed toilet).
Tweetie for Mac was released in May 2009, for free. It came with some pretty ads. In the space of 2-3 months, our little ad service went from a couple hundred thousand of impressions per month to millions. And revenue rose accordingly.
Hindsight is a Beautiful Thing
Truly, every first time business owner learns a lot with their first venture. Looking back, there are many things I would have done differently. The most important lesson was allowing my company’s health to be so closely tied to someone else’s business. Twitter, via Tweetie for Mac, was such a large component of our ability to earn an income that when the news hit, I felt my feet coming out from under me.
As for Fusion, after that day, I vowed to never let our company depend so heavily on one source of traffic. If we survived.
Survive we did, and it’s still a profitable business today. But it was never the same once Twitter took control and our ads were removed from Tweetie on the desktop.
I can only imagine how much money Loren was earning from the iPhone client. He never seemed overly concerned about the revenue coming in from the Mac client. Even though we paid him what would be a respectable full time income over the course of a year, I believe it was a drop in the bucket to what the iPhone client brought in. He certainly never warmed up to our idea of offering a free iPhone client that included Fusion’s ads. That would compete directly with his fire hose of cash.
But I respected all his decisions — to keep our ads out of the iPhone client, to sell his business to Twitter — all of them. He treated us well and our business took off because of his talent. I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity that came from our partnership with his hard work. It allowed us to build a business, a profitable business that enabled writers, designers and developers to earn some income for sharing their thoughts and work with the world.
I have nothing but respect for Loren Brichter.
I Can’t Say the Same for Twitter
I share my story because it singles the beginning of how my view of Twitter began to change. Our few interactions with them, consisting mostly of a few brief emails after the acquisition, made it quite clear that they were not concerned about the health of the various other entities that contributed to the Twitter ecosystem. They were concerned about Twitter, period.
We never truly expected them to adopt our ads or make Fusion somehow a part of their service. But there was a lack of clear communication — a simple, direct attempt to make clear their intentions would have gone a long way. We never received that.
My experience with Twitter as a company, coupled with my experience as a user of their service, has only soured over time. Watching their decisions become increasingly hostile to their early adopters and developer community, along with the most recent API announcement, only further cements the fact that my time as a user of their service is soon coming to an end.
A Tale of Two Services
In 2007, I quit Facebook (at least, I stopped using it — my account is still taking up resources somewhere). Partially because of their clear disdain for privacy, but also because it was becoming so mainstream. I have to admit my penchant for exclusiveness — when my parents and non-tech friends start using something I do, I feel the itch to find something new.
That issue arose with Twitter — it’s mainstream now. Has been for a while. But the experience is different due to the mechanics of the service. I control who I follow, what content comes into my stream. If someone talks too much, or posts content I don’t care for, I can unfollow them. For the most part, even if I disagree with Twitter’s decisions, the experience hasn’t suffered.
Sadly, Twitter is so forced to pander to investors, so set on earning ad revenue, that its users are the commodity. As it is with most free services. And it now looks all to likely that their intentions will in fact cause the experience, my experience, to suffer.
Clearly, the early adopters and 3rd party client developers are not the hand that feeds Twitter. We were at one point, but no longer. They are not biting the hand that feeds, but rather the one that helped them get to where they are.
They’ve long moved on, focusing on the hand that feeds now.
Illusionists
One other aspect of all this really bugs me. Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone garner a lot of praise, are credited for changing the world. And in a sense, their creations have. Blogger and Twitter have both had a significant effect for how people communicate online. So credit where credit is due.
But now that they’ve moved on from Twitter and are now launching and backing new services, here’s what I’d like to see from them: the ability to earn a profit. They’re clearly savvy creatives — they have the ability to put a team together, build a product or service, then market it successfully.
But earn revenue, period? Not so much.
What now? It’s too early to tell if app.net will be successful. If it does, it most likely won’t be a success of the scale of Twitter or Facebook. Or, maybe we need to redefine success. Dalton Caldwell’s vision is a service that earns revenue from its users, not because of them.
If the service manages to bring in the kind of people that originally drew me to Twitter, then it will be a success for me. I’ll happily pay for such a thing.
Jul 23rd, 2012
Marco Arment follows up to his much-linked-to post on Google’s acquisition of Sparrow. He finishes with this:
Don’t blame Sparrow. Blame the terrible market for email clients.
Actually, I’ll blame Google. For their free email service that treats users as a commodity rather a customer. Then I’ll blame all of us who continue to make use of these free services. There would be more than enough paying users for applications like Sparrow if there were very few users who were willing to be used as a mechanism to earn advertising dollars. This issue of the big boys buying up all the talent is built upon the bedrock concept that widespread web services have to be free.
Mar 9th, 2012
Ben made some great points in this article that got my attention. I’ve long been an user of Instapaper, but have also kept an account open with Readability and a keen eye on the directions they’ve been taking. And when the Readability iOS apps recently became available, I moved my remaining Instapaper items to Readability.
Hear me on this though: Instapaper is a fantastic app and platform, and Marco is a smart guy who makes good decisions (you only have to read his recent post on learning from competition to see that he’ll make a smart move in response to Readability’s offerings).
I moved to Readability for one reason — I greatly prefer the reading experience. Not just the superstar fonts from the superstar foundry, which has gotten the lion’s share of the attention. It’s also the thoughtful UI decisions, on the iOS apps as well as the web interface.
But Ben made me think my decision over again. The key point:
With Readability, who is the customer? Is the free user the customer? The VC helping fund it? Or is Readability itself the customer and the Publishers the ones paying Readability to do something they never asked Readability to do? (After all they take 30% before paying out to publishers.)
Having recently moved from Google’s products to Apple’s, how could I forget that I am loathe to use a free service where I am the commodity? I worry that the same things that bother me about Google, and Twitter as well, will become an issue with Readability. Ben links to an article that gives a little glimpse that the folks behind Readability may be in the same boat that the majority of the startup, web world has embraced:
Your support documents state that “premium supports the costs to run the service, continued development” and paying publishers. If all of your customers go with a free account, how does Readability intend to make money? We’re still navigating towards a plan in that respect. Right now, we just want to build a big and engaged community.
When a founder says the want to build a platform, then figure out how to monetize it, my neck hairs shoot up.
In this area, Marco has them beat. He’s self-funded, he’s in complete control, and most importantly, he’s a likeable guy. It all adds up to people like me preferring to support the little guy who’s willing to charge for his hard work from day one.
All that to say the jury is still out for me. I’m sticking with Readability for now, but I’m still watching both services. The reality is that we, the users, are in better shape because there is competition in this space.
