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Twitter investor Chris Sacca explains how Periscope can make money


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Chris Sacca wrote 8500 words?!

In a lengthy, nearly 8,500-word blog post on Wednesday, Sacca expressed his views about what Twitter needs to do to re-ignite growth and get it out of the Wall Street doghouse. In that post, the Lowercase Capital founder touched upon what he says is Periscope's big monetization opportunity. 

Periscope's goldmine lies in building an archive of old videos created with the app by users ranging from magician David Blaine to entrepreneur Richard Branson: 

When the time comes to monetize Periscope (which I agree is not yet), the easiest path will be to place very short/Vine-length ads just before the playback of archived broadcasts. There is absolutely no need to place ads into a livestream and interrupt the user experience. The archived video playback alone will generate incredible cash-flow in addition to being perfect for search results and a huge honeypot for attracting new users. 

There's only one problem: Periscope videos currently disappear after 24 hours, a feature that Sacca calls "heartbreaking," and concerning to him as an investor. "Each of those videos would otherwise be interesting and watchable for a long time to come, but now they are gone."

"All broadcasts on Periscope need to be archived for playback permanently, unless the broadcaster chooses to delete the recording," he says.

This vision for Periscope runs contrary to the current trend of ephemeral social media content, epitomized by Snapchat's disappearing photos and videos. Perhaps the bigger opportunity, at least in Sacca's view, is for Periscope to be more like YouTube, a repository of evergreen videos that attract a steady stream of eyeballs and advertising dollars. 

SEE ALSO: Here’s who insiders think could replace Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

The main points of Sacca's post:

What is Twitter doing right and wrong?

Here's what Sacca writes is going well at Twitter: 

  1. The pace of product development has accelerated dramatically.
  2. Twitter has shown a willingness to take more risk in making changes to the core product.
  3. Revenue is growing at 74% year over year. (There is no public company of that scale growing anywhere near as fast.)
  4. The management team has stopped selling their stock.
  5. The Google deal is a big win.
  6. Periscope and TellApart are strong acquisitions. (Periscope may prove to be the most important deal Twitter has ever done.)

And here's what Sacca says is going wrong:

  1. New user growth has stalled.
  2. Almost one billion users have tried Twitter and not stuck around.
  3. Direct response advertising has fallen short of hopes.
  4. Wall Street’s confidence in the management team has diminished.
  5. Twitter has been unable to convince investors of its potential upside.

What should the company do next?

Here are some of his top suggestions for the company.

Be bolder and faster: Twitter cannot afford do build take an incremental approach to product development. “Twitter will need to take huge risks, deeply question its key assumptions and launch materially new stuff early and often."

Rethink the chronological tweets format and the follower model: “In many other cases, users won’t care if those Tweets are ten seconds or one hour or two days hold. In parallel, they won’t care if the Tweets were posted by someone they follow nor not.”

Introduce a “live” feature and “save” button: Make it easier to follow live events through separate tabs and human editors. Offer a way for users to save interesting information that appears on Twitter such as book recommendations or videos.

Create stand-alone “channel” apps. Offer special channels arranged by topic, location and popularity.  Twitter could create a special app for news junkies or an NBA app.

Sacca's whole blog post:

http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/

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