Dick Costolo: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. Dick, I have a follow up question. It's sort of a similar question but on a different axis. It's this sort of comparing Twitter to Facebook. We should first acknowledge, oh, my god, Twitter is a company that has 300 something million users. That's amazing. They do $3.5 billion a year in revenue right now. I can't fathom how difficult it is to build an enterprise that does that. At the same time, when you compare it to Facebook, the amount that Twitter is able to generate in revenue on any given user, and you can look at this number globally, you can look at this number scope specifically to the US, is lower. Is there an intrinsic reason about why that is, will always, or is more naturally the case? It's a good question. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, to be honest. I don't know what the upper bound on either one of those is. Obviously, it's the case that on Facebook you can micro target most everything about those users. An advertiser—you know where they live, you know where they went to school, you know what high school they went to, you know relationship statuses, and on and on and on. On Twitter, you don't. You don't know that. You have an interest graph, but you don't have a detailed demographic understanding of your users. The ability to micro target by demographics gives them extraordinary pricing power. Who knows? It's hard to know where either of those tops out, I guess, is the short answer. The only reason for the difference that I can think of are interest targeting versus demographic targeting. It's possible that you could come up with a world in which nothing really changes about the way you think about either user base, but the average revenue per user or the value of a user flip flops because of some other innovation. I just don't know what the answer to that is. Yeah, it's interesting. It's funny. We don't know any demographic information about our listeners, but we do know what they like. From that, we can extrapolate that they're an incredibly valuable audience. I don't need to know demographic information to know that everybody who listens to us skews toward founders, skews towards executives, skews towards investors. Knowing that means that there are much more valuable audiences than if I knew the demographics stuff. I've heard that argument before, that Facebook has more information so you can target more granularity, so you can charge higher amounts. You can guarantee that someone's getting exactly the customer they think they're getting. I always come back to this thing where, gosh, if you can know the things people care about, for certain, used cases are much more valuable about that.…

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