A twitter feed isn't random though. You choose who you follow on Twitter, if the links they provide are unhelpful you unfollow them. It is more random than Google but still tailored to your preferences.

I think you're hung up on the "stare at" wording. I interpreted the words to mean "use" - hope that clarifies my point.

People use twitter in many different ways. You are assuming people carefully select who they follow. Many people dont, they follow all sorts of people often based on one tweet. You have no way of knowing what other stuff they are going to write about because it's people. Furthermore a lot of people follow thousands or hundreds of people and are simply not able to follow everything thats going on in their feed.

Compared to a google search result it is completely in the opposite end

I am not hung up on anything. I am saying that your comparison is as wrong as comparing DuckDuckGo with an RSS feed. There is so much noise even with the things you carefully select.

Compared to a google search where I am going specifically for something and is showing my intent.

I don't go to google to see whats going on, I go there to find something very specific.

I feel as though we've gone off topic here.

You said that twitter doesnt provide value "because they stare at the feed only to find something that then lives somewhere else."

When you search Google you're finding things that live somewhere else. I'm simply pointing out that you don't need to host the content the user is looking for to provide value.

I'm not saying the companies are the same. I'm not saying Twitter can be successful the same way Google has. I'm agreeing with all your points besides the fact that you need to host content to provide value.

No I said their problem with monetization for twitter was that people don't spend enough time on twitter but instead on the places that tweets lead to.

In other words they provide plenty of value they are just not able to make a living from it.

Instead they should get more people to stay on their own platform by allowing more content to be created there just like Facebook is.

I agree getting more content on twitter is an good option for montetization. It might even be the best one.

I brought up Google because time spent on a site doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot more ad revenue. What matters is serving up useful ads that provide value to the user and advertisers. Google is great at that - Twitter isn't because of many reasons you've stated.

So maybe twitter should be trying to improve their ad program to serve better ads. If they can't do that well (no way they could do it as well as Google) then perhaps increasing time users spend on Twitter is their best option.

I only wanted to point out that the solution is not self evident. Just because people are using a service to find content hosted elsewhere does not mean it can't make money. The problem might be that Twitter is bad at finding ads people want to see.

You brough up google because you claimed that google was making money on what twitter wasn't able to and thats simply wrong.

Ok