Exits continue as Twitter looks at more ad revenues from India
The exits in Twitter’s senior management who helped build the India business over years, signal the company’s co-founder and new CEO, Jack Dorsey’s, inclination to make significant changes in the way the domestic business is handled.
On Thursday, Parminder Singh, managing director of West Asia and north Africa or MENA/ Southeast Asia/India, put in his papers.His resignation came two days after the company’s India head Rishi Jaitly quit.
The micro-blogging site has been struggling to generate ad revenues in India.
According to Greyhound Research, the digital advertising market in India is currently around ₹7,000 crore – 75% of which is with Google and Facebook. Twitter, along with dozens of other digital ad platforms such as InMobi, has struggled to get a share of the remaining 25% of the market. In fact, Twitter’s share of the ad wallet is in single-digits.
A Twitter spokesperson refused to comment for the story.
Though the breakup for ad rev- enue from social media in India is not available, digital ad agency Adlift estimates it to be around $250 million (₹1,669 crore) — most of which is with Facebook.
“Twitter has one product they go to the market with, which is not enough. Facebook has 10 different formats. It is difficult to promote rich media on Twitter,” said Prashant Puri, CEO and co-founder of Adlift.
But Twitter may have some answers. On Thursday, the company appointed Maya Hari to head India operations. Hari previously managed Twitter’s ads product strategy and adoption for Asia Pacific, MENA and Latin America, and according to experts, her appointment is a good move since she is a products person instead of a sales person.
To become more acceptable to advertisers, Twitter recently removed the 140-character limit for putting pictures, videos and quoted tweets.
But the company is nowhere close to Facebook in targeted advertisement. “Take gender, location and age — Facebook is the only platform to have that kind of data. In mobile app advertisement, location gets the highest price-per-click,” Puri said.
Getting India right becomes more important for Twitter. According to San Franciscobased app intelligence firm App Annie, Twitter’s monthly active user base grew 35% in India in September, against the previous month, while in the US it rose 4%.
“A network can be judged on two parameters: quality and quantity. Quality can be defined by the stickiness of the network, and the information that its users share. Facebook is miles ahead with Instagram, FB Messenger and WhatsApp,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and chief analyst at Greyhound Research.