My guess is that profits will be low. And they should be. Declared profits are basically a way of saying, "We can't figure anything more useful to do with this money than put it in the bank or give it back to our investors."
That's fine for a large company in a stable market. But Twitter is a young company battling to establish market share with products they hope will last for decades or centuries. [1] If the management really can't think of anything useful to do with cash, they should step down and help hire somebody who can.
[1] Yes, centuries. The New York Times started publishing in 1851. It's reasonable to think that the World Wide Web will have a historical place similar to print periodicals. And network-effect businesses are notoriously hard to dislodge once widely adopted.
The web is _very_ churny; waves of people move from service to service over 5-10 year adoption cycles. Eventually people will declare twitter "uncool" (perhaps as a result of abuse problems?) and move onto the next thing.
The modern web has been very churny, but I think we have been witnessing the equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion [1]. Eventually both tech and behavior will settle down. Some evidence for that was the rapid churn cycles in social tools from 2002-2008 or so. But Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn could well be where the musical-chairs game stops.
That's fine for a large company in a stable market. But Twitter is a young company battling to establish market share with products they hope will last for decades or centuries. [1] If the management really can't think of anything useful to do with cash, they should step down and help hire somebody who can.
[1] Yes, centuries. The New York Times started publishing in 1851. It's reasonable to think that the World Wide Web will have a historical place similar to print periodicals. And network-effect businesses are notoriously hard to dislodge once widely adopted.