Twitter’s product lead in charge of video, Baljeet Singh, will exit the micro-blogging firm early next month, says a report from Re/code citing multiple unnamed sources. Singh was serving as senior product director and joined Twitter about two years ago. Prior to this, he worked at YouTube for about five years.
Yet another big loss for Twitter
At Twitter, Singh was responsible for overseeing the consumer video products for the main app, among other things, but other video properties such as Periscope and Vine did not come under him, the report says. Re/code got a confirmation from a Twitter spokesperson regarding Singh’s departure.
Video plays a very important role in the social media realm. Facebook is full of videos. Snapchat too is working on building its business around video. It has been seen that in the last six months, Twitter’s interest in video has increased as well. Twitter-owned Vine appears to be more popular than Twitter in terms of sharing unique video content.
For a long time, there have been discussions both inside and outside the company about creating a more direct relationship between Twitter and Vine. Though nothing has happened yet, the micro-blogging is reportedly making efforts to bring its video products together.
Executive exodus continues
Twitter is struggling to increase the number of users, and at the same time, an executive exodus is also bothering the firm. The problem was at its peak in 2014 and continued this year. The last two to three weeks have been the worst for the company as it lost several major executives, such as VP of Design Mike Davidson and engineer Utkarsh Srivastava, who played a very crucial role in building the company’s ad business.
Over the past six months, there have been several departures of strong product leaders from the micro-blogging firm, with the highlight being the departure of three key product execs in June. October saw the departure of Glenn Brown, an ad executive who was handling Twitter’s video ad push.
On Wednesday, Twitter stock closed up 1.4% at $24.29. Year to date, the stock is down by over 32%, while in the last one month it is down by over 4%. The stock has a 52-week high of $53.49 and a 52-week low of $21.01.
