Why the main competitors of Twitter are Twitch and Reddit
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- March 29th, 2017
The Verge editor Casey Newton published a column where he expressed the opinion that the popularity of Twitter is declining. According to him, now the microblogging service has two valuable assets: publications in real time and a network of registered celebrities. But Newton is sure that such platforms as Reddit and Twitch will eventually win the competition from Twitter. The editorial staff of AIN.UA has chosen the main one and provides an adapted column translation.
On March 21, Reddit announced the introduction of personal profiles. They show user publications in reverse chronological order, as well as the "subscribe" button. The co-founder of the website, Alexis Ohanyan, said that the profiles are "a step forward for Reddit, both for the platform", which will allow users to share publications that are not suitable for specific sabreddits.
The new tool is familiar to people who use Twitter. Moreover, the choice of the announcement date was ruthless: the Reddit update was on the 11th birthday of the microblogging service.
New profiles in Reddit - the second clone of Twitter for a month. In early March, the Twitch streaming service, which belongs to Amazon, announced the launch of Pulse, a news feed similar to the main microblogging service tool.
On the one hand, for many years already large social platforms have borrowed each other's functions. Facebook alone took over the "like" from Tumbrl, "Chekin" from Foursquare, "hot topics" from Twitter and "history" from Snapchat. On the other hand, recent attempts by large companies to integrate the news feed indicate that they do not copy the microblogging service, but absorb it. Before our eyes Twitter "share", and the consequences are fascinating.
From the very beginning, Twitter worked to assemble a number of valuable tools. Since 2007, the service has become a place where users could publish news, photos, send personal and public messages. It is on this basis that Twitter continues to sell advertising.
Competitors are working to deprive the service of a whole package of tools. Now Twitter has two most stable values: public live broadcasts and a network of celebrities (politicians, athletes and journalists) who use the platform for public discussions. But some rich companies also want to adopt these tools - and this time they can succeed.
In the Silicon Valley, the term "separation" refers to a certain type of destruction of a profitable company model. Craigslist has absorbed a number of different services for sale and has become a single marketplace. Airbnb adopted the principles of rental housing platforms and turned it into a huge business.
Twitter is also slowly "shared". In 2010 Instagram launched with a reference to photography and quickly took over the market. The microblogging service for a long time has not invested in the development of instant messaging and now it is ahead of iMessage, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger.
Facebook was the first and main competitor to Twitter. Analyst Ben Thompson believes that the social network has slowed the growth of microblogging services due to the constant development and creation of an algorithmic news feed. Facebook grew faster than Twitter and became the place where most users share links. But a social network can not provide information in real time, as microblogging does.
Twitter remains the platform for operational news. But now not only Facebook is competing with the company in this sphere. In 2015, Apple launched Apple News, which later became a significant source of traffic for publications. At the same time, a small development team is working on a Nuzzel application that sends notifications when the user's friends share the same links on Facebook and Twitter. This means that a person does not need to open a microblogging service at all.
As a result, Twitter has one asset - a network of registered celebrities, including Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and others. It is impossible to imagine the collapse of the service just because famous people constantly communicate with the audience and each other.
In this light, the actions of Reddit and Amazon become even more interesting. Their leadership knows that services also have their own influential network of users. Given the ambitions of both platforms, both Reddit and Twitch can become a threat to Twitter.
At the same time Instagram without noise creates more and more tools that will help the service to build its network of celebrities. The application is already used by many famous people, and Instagram is constantly introducing new features. I constantly ask myself: what if Instagram allows to share text publications? If you take into account the number of published screenshots, you can come to the conclusion that this is inevitable. On the site of the Twitter leadership, I would have started to fear this.
Being under pressure, the microblogging service tried to create a new business model around the online broadcasts. But it only showed how old the model of earnings of the company fell into decay. Among the Twitter fans there is a belief that the service is indispensable. But the truth is that Twitter is already being replaced.
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