It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.
It does seem like having early access to all tweets would be immensely valuable, even if it was only a second of lead time. (Sure, Trump tweets are valuable on their own, but market info has to be encoded into coarse-grained info about individually useless tweets as well.) Unless they have an explicit policy against it, Twitter must be selling this, right?
New business model: For $1M per tweet, you can have a 50ms head-start on tweets from Trump. Just Trump, just one tier of headstart/pricing. You prepay for the next N tweets. You can set time-ranges (like, "when the markets are open") for when you want to pay for the headstart.
I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right?
Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.
> In 1983, Switzer was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an alleged civil violation of the laws prohibiting "insider trading" of securities. He defended himself as having innocently overheard the information while lounging on the bleacher behind some corporate insiders—at a stadium where Switzer was watching his elder son compete in a track meet. The case was tried in Oklahoma City United States District Court (before a special U.S. District Judge appointed from Kansas). The case was dismissed at the conclusion of the Government's case for its failure to demonstrate that there had been any purposeful disclosure to Switzer.
The situation is even more clear for Twitter. If I'm a marine biologist making the world's most detailed measurements of the ocean, I can clearly use this info to buy or sell stock in a fishing company, even if I don't release that info publicly. Likewise, I can sell that info to someone else who makes the trades.
After reviewing the info you provided, I beleive you are mainly right. The only exception i can think of would be a situation where trump possesed inside information due to his position, then shared it via twitter early. That would be a violation, but it gets complex, and im having trouble formulating the exact line.
Prices are not nonpublic info. You can get them a number of ways without using bloomberg. Most people in finance believe in at least semi-efficient markets which means prices are not material anyway
It's reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie 'Network').
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
Local ad networks masquerading as news organizations. Record labels and newspapers have a lot in common; they were global logistics companies first (the core competence of Atlantic was shipping highly-processed petrochemical discs around the world) and media companies not really at all.
What newspapers had was a lock on the business now owned by Craigslist, with the transport and fulfillment network (newsagents and delivery vans!) being the key asset. Once that went away they were no longer businesses.
They didn't see it that way, but that's because their core business was so good they could afford to delude themselves - it didn't matter that they didn't know what they were really doing, the business model was that powerful. Google is remarkably similar in many ways.
The networks were given broadcast spectrum in return for one hour a day of public service, which took the form of news broadcasts. This was taken quite seriously by the original owners of the networks as a solemn duty to inform the public. They built large, global news gathering organizations that were a source of pride to them personally. They practically competed to lose the most money on news. (IIRC, by the mid-80's losses were in the $300m/yr ballpark.)
By 1987, a number of factors - changes in ownership for the big 3 networks, upstart FOX network, the increasing importance of celebrity anchors on ratings, deregulation of media ownership laws and other factors - caused a mass shift towards looking at news as profit centers.
Ken Auletta's "Three Blind Mice" is excellent. (At least on recollection. It profoundly changed my understanding of the media when I read it 25 years ago.)
Newspapers have never had such constraints but there were laws limiting the concentration of ownership aimed at making sure people had diverse influences in any one market. For instance, TV channels could not be owned by the same company that owned a newspaper in the same market. I don't know enough off the top of my head to expand more usefully on that.
Also just got James Fallows' book "Breaking the News" – he's one of my favorite writers at the Atlantic, and so far it's a great book – don't know if it talks about this aspect of the news, but still worth checking out.
You can reach people on Twitter, but there's some question as to how much you can influence people. Periodically I see articles from people with hundreds of thousands of followers who admit to being unable to translate that into sales, or hits to their site, or votes, or whatever.
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Snapchat has a novel engagement mechanism. Short multimedia interactive ads in a captured setting. The format has potential. The Snapstream keeps people hooked. It's basically a next gen Facebook but more private.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
