Twitter for Sale?

It seems that the Haiku for Morons site that is currently running at a loss is seeking a buyer.

Twitter has been holding talks with potential suitors including Facebook and Google that could value the micro-blogging site at $10bn (£6.2bn), according to reports.

Which, I guess, just goes to show that there is one born every minute. Did no one learn from the dot com crash ten years ago? I’m assuming that they would hope to make money from advertising revenue –  once all that money raised from venture capitalists has been paid back –  they ain’t a charity after all.

I can’t help but wonder when it will all implode as it did before. These are classic castles built on sand. There is nothing to sustain them –  the services offered to users are free and advertising isn’t a guarantee of income either, just ask the newspapers. Besides, with tools like Adblocker, people like me don’t view the ads anyway, thereby denying that revenue, and I am far from alone.

So, with all these billions of dollars floating about –  how, exactly, will it make money? And why would anyone want to buy it? Come to that, why would anyone want to use it?

This all follows on from the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL, thereby reminding us that AOL don’t learn from their mistakes either. One of the first things to be pointed out is that erstwhile contributors will no longer be offering their services for free. Again, I can only presume that AOL are looking at advertising and I’m not sure that that is a sustainable revenue stream. They could go along the same route as the Times and use a pay wall, but I suspect that would be the deathknell for the Post. Or maybe, like Murdoch’s title, they can afford to lose 90% of their readership, making up the lost advertising revenue with reader subscriptions.

Maybe I’m wrong in all of this, but it all seems to be Monopoly money flying about without any actual product or service to support it. If someone actually notices it, then the whole edifice will come tumbling down leaving some people seriously out of pocket.

All of this reminds me of something close to home. One of my clients is seeking to sell her business. Unfortunately, there is nothing of substance to sell. What was once a thriving operation is now a name, two associates and a list of dormant clients. Knowing that I have no money, she approached my fellow associate and asked him if he was interested. As he gently pointed out, she had nothing to sell and no, he wasn’t going to buy it. We are currently trying to kick start the business and if we are successful, then maybe there will be something saleable, but in the meantime, like Twitter there is nothing of substance, no clients and no revenue stream.

I dunno, maybe I’m missing something here.