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24/7 Wall St. TV: What If Twitter Disappears?

The Twitter outage introduces the concept of whether anyone would really miss the service if it went away. Financial experts have argued that Twitter is not worth much even with its 30 million or so unique visitors, a number that…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published August 12, 2009, 10:10am ET · 2 min read

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The Twitter outage introduces the concept of whether anyone would really miss the service if it went away. Financial experts have argued that Twitter is not worth much even with its 30 million or so unique visitors, a number that varies wildly depending on the source. The press has carried stories over the last few months reporting that the service is growing 1,400%, 500%, and, in some cases, is barely growing at all. Ars Technica recently reviewed Twitter research done by HubSpot. The tech website reported that “HubSpot’s analysis of Twitter’s 4.5 million accounts revealed that 54.9 percent of users have never tweeted and 52.7 have no followers whatsoever.” Put more simply, many of the people who sign up for Twitter accounts never use them.

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It may be old fashioned to look at the value of a business based on whether it provides any real service to the people who are its “customers.”  The best way to evaluate that may simply be to ask what would happen if Twitter suddenly went away. In the case of McDonald’s (MCD), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), or Wal-Mart (WMT) a sudden disappearance would be a really big problem for its customers.

If Twitter closes, or ceases to operate because its service is constantly interrupted, no one would be really affected.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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