Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Twitter Is Showing More Ads Instead of Better Ideas

A social media company that doesn’t know much about its users needs to work harder on its business model.

May 30, 2019 at 10:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Just think.
Photographer: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images

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Twitter is showing its users more ads. That’s a clumsy approach to boosting advertising revenue in an age of sophisticated micro-targeting, and it shows the weakness of Twitter’s business model.

The problem is that Twitter fosters fleeting engagements with its users. Sure, people like to flip quickly through 280-character fragments of #thin content. But that isn’t necessarily good for advertisers who want to hook users and draw them off-platform. Moreover, unlike the ad behemoths Google and Facebook, Twitter doesn't learn much about its users as they interact with the site.