The Twitter Advertiser Exodus

https://caterina.net/2022/11/21/the-twitter-advertiser-exodus/

by bdr • 4 years ago

218 302 4 years ago

The people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they "sink in":

Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

kristintynski14• 4 years ago

This is so damning. Twitter always had mediocre ROI as an ad platform in my experience. Now it is literally becoming dangerous for your business. Imagine a 10-100k per day ad campaign from years ago being made live by buggy software and not realizing it...

bathtub365• 4 years ago

Wouldn’t you have standing to sue them if they did this? I guess it depends on the legal agreement you have and how it stipulates they can bill you

kelseyfrog• 4 years ago

That's the engineering bias at play. While I agree that can still be "up" with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs, being "up" doesn't mean making money. It completely ignores the fact that Twitter makes their money on B2B with advertisers and even in 2022, those are human social relations. Firing the people on the Twitter side of that equation destroys those relations and ultimately the dollars they represent.

It's perfectly natural for an engineer to de-value B2B relations - I expect it, but at the same time that's the grain of salt we should take when we read an engineer's hot takes.

autotune• 4 years ago

with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs

Except didn't he fire them too?

RC_ITR2• 4 years ago

It's also what Musk's fans often refer to as 'moving the goalposts.'

Keeping Twitter up is not success for Elon

He needs to make it worth well more than the $44bn he paid for it in order to achieve anything resembling success; the Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down.

what would that even look like? Yet, not achieving that insane failure is now what people cite as success.

vkou2• 4 years ago

And likewise, it's easy to keep a service "Up" if you don't deploy any code changes. Unfortunately, feature launches, bug fixes, one-off backfills, and all the other nonsense that comes with actually running a business tends to require deploying code.

You can fire everyone and fully re-staff the firm, and eventually get to the point where you can do all of those things safely. But it's going to take a hell of a long time and downtime to shake out all the things that can go wrong in the myriad of unplanned interactions between different services.

I don't expect Twitter to crash and burn in the sense of the website being down and not coming back up. But I do expect feature velocity to grind to a halt, until all of these self-inflicted wounds are staunched.

wyclif8• 4 years ago

Two separate things there, just as you point out: being "up" and being profitable.

But my original criticism was about all of the hysteria in the last two weeks about Twitter "going down". Those sky-is-falling tweets got very little pushback. The claim was not about profitability or advertising; there were only these shrill voices claiming the site would stop working. And when that didn't materialize, all the people making those claims just went about their business without any personal repercussions or call outs. It was all just motivated by irrational Musk hatred generated by politics. It had nothing to do with technology. You can still see these tweets right now, a lot of people didn't delete them when Twitter didn't burn.

I always held out the possibility that Twitter could die, but if it does it will be a slow death. It all depends on if the new payment model generates enough cash to offset advertising losses. So in that sense I agree with her conclusion.

goalieca• 4 years ago

Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken.

The rest of Twitter is pretty solid. Why this? This is the money maker. Is it because product wanted the human touch of sales instead of self-serve?

fragmede• 4 years ago

Customers like Coke or Nike don't want self service though.

DisjointedHunt2• 4 years ago

Because the author seems to have a bone to pick.

orange_joe• 4 years ago

I’ve been noticing bugs, particularly around not having tweets load, and for a few days it seemed that iMessage previews were quite broken.

nemothekid2• 4 years ago

All speculation:

login with SSO and 2FA broken.

I believe this was the result of turning off the "get rid of all the microservices " directive Elon pushed. I don't think it was malicious; some badly name microservice that was probably in charge of sending text messages or generating session tokens was shut off and the dependency chain wasn't fully understood.

AdsUI

Anyone spending enough money for Twitter to case likely has an account manager who does everything for them. Anything that isn't in the "happy path" of the AdsUI probably gets handled by some engineer making some API calls to a prod API because it's unique enough to not worry about putting AdsUI and urgent enough where someone had to take care of it now.

sroussey4• 4 years ago

The rest of Twitter is not solid. I’ve seen more bugs in the last two weeks than in the past two years.

Caveat: the Twitter nonsense has me using Twitter more than before. It’s like Cubhouse a year ago.

johannes1234321• 4 years ago

There's a bunch of bugs. I got to reload more often than previously as tweets don't load. In the DMs view it tells me all my contacts joined Twitter in 1970. Bunch more of those small things. The core works, but there is a notable degration. I also assume that can be stabilized with acceptable (to Musk) effort and then it loves on, while they rebuild knowledge about old and work on something new (be it new features or a new replacement system)

There are discussions around a WeChat-like "everything app" I can speculate that one of the "success" paths is to have that "everything" is somewhat built around Tesla, which is quite a pivot, but hey, don't you need a Tesla Assistant communicating with your friends and providing your news during the commute and for paying for coffee while AutoPilot guides you thought the boring tunnel!? And then selling it to Tesla and thus offloading some of his debt to Tesla shareholders (see SolarWorld)

Sure, will take a bit, especially so that SEC and other Tesla shareholders won't go after him, but an independent IPO seems far off.

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken

if all of those have somehow deteriorated in 1-2 weeks, this is further justification for axing the people who made them.

shagie5• 4 years ago

If I've got something that needs an hour of care every week by a sales person, https://xkcd.com/1205/ puts it at about 10 days (two weeks) of work to make it more efficient.

However, if shaving that 1h a week off takes more than 10 days of work, it is probably better to leave it as it is.

https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug...

This bug tracking works on Pain / Effort / Frequency and Risk / Effort / Verifiability

Realizing that I'm making up numbers here (and you can make them up too for the story we're telling each other):

    Pain   : 2 (low pain)
    Effort : 2 (low effort)
    Freq.  : 4 (fairly often)

We've got a PEF of 8 there. Note that this is the pain for the hypothetical sales person - not the pain for the end advertiser who the sales person works with.

So, what's the risk of making the change to make it so that the sales person doesn't have to do that 1h/week task? How much effort does it take? How easy is it to verify that its actually working?

And so now we've got bugs where we can put them on a grid and say "these fixes are the low hanging fruit" while "these other ones are risky and don't get us much."

Its quite possible that that this issue would never get into the "this is painful and so we need to do the analysis for it" or "this is low hanging fruit that can be fixed and have a big impact on 'stuff'".

Nonetheless, you've got something that takes 1h/week from someone who knows what they're doing with their accounts... and they're not working there anymore. Even in a perfect org, this could fall apart rather quickly.

mjmsmith3• 4 years ago

If Twitter goes down, it just shows that all those people were incompetent, and he should have fired them.

If Twitter stays up, it just shows that all those people were unnecessary, and he should have fired them.

adgjlsfhk12• 4 years ago

2fa broke because Elon ordered all the micro services to be shut down

DisjointedHunt2• 4 years ago

Large accounts >$1mm spend routinely get zero support on platforms such as Facebook. That side of the business also goes through ridiculous re-orgs.

This quote makes it sound as though they had an AE/AM visit them every week ? Most advertisers count themselves lucky to hear from the ads teams once a quarter outside regular scripted emails.

snowwrestler4• 4 years ago

That’s not my experience at all. My employer is way below $1m annual spend on FB and our in-house ad manager has regular check-in calls with a FB rep who is local to our city. Same with Google and LinkedIn.

kristintynski14• 4 years ago

Those teams help grow revenue. The more help they give, the more the advertiser is likely to increase their spend. They do a lot of heavy lifting to help educate ad teams about about new ad products and software changes.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

That....can't be coincidental, and smells an awful lot like fraud.

nailer2• 4 years ago

Twitter advertiser here. Even before the takeover Twitter advertising was broken and unreliable - starting a new campaign on a desktop would fail as the payment UI loaded a bunch of internal DNS names and failed.

Note again: this is a few weeks BEFORE Elon took over. So yes its broken, I think they generally weren’t working particularly hard on it before either.

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

WTAF? At the end of the day, advertisers are the real customers. How is their experience not a priority?!

thwayunion4• 4 years ago

> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated.

This happened to me as well. Absolutely wild and will go to my grave before paying a dime.

samweb3• 4 years ago

This is likely temporary and advertisers have a short memory. If the platform starts targeting people more effectively and CPMs / CPCs are decent, they will be back. Most of this should be self-serve with third-party marketing agencies helping clients anyway.

mhoad• 4 years ago

You don’t seem to understand WHY they are leaving. This isn’t some moral solidarity thing that they are doing for PR reasons.

mrtksn5• 4 years ago

Unlike with engineering, there's very little practical or deep articles about issues like brand safety, etc. and most people seem like parroting the same arguments without anyone explaining why this is the case.

You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can't learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks.

I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?

FartyMcFarter2• 4 years ago

It's easy to understand: people in most companies don't appreciate having their ads next to porn, extremist content, or violent content. Especially so when it's posted as a reply to the ads.

mrtksn5• 4 years ago

The part about them not liking is the obvious one but there's nothing about why they don't like it. Is it something like not liking pineapple on pizza? is it like not liking extremely muscular human body? Or does it actually have some kind of logic?

Because if it has logic we can reason about it.

I know for a fact that all those brands actually do advertisement on some websites where horrible stuff are discussed.

snowwrestler4• 4 years ago

And maybe people don’t appreciate this but on Twitter, brands are totally dependent on Twitter HQ to moderate this content. That is because all the replies are tweets as well, and you can’t delete other people’s tweets.

On Facebook, in comparison, you can delete nasty comments on a post by your brand. Brand safety is far more in your own hands there. I think this is true on LinkedIn too, although I’m not certain. In general it is a much “cleaner” place because of the focus on real names and career content.

TigeriusKirk• 4 years ago

Explicit hardcore porn has been on Twitter for years, and yet companies didn't worry at all about putting their ads on the site.

hombre_fatal• 4 years ago

I know what you're saying. Imagine the kind of experience you'd need to get close to the dynamics here and provide real insight instead of parroting what you hear/assume to be the answer because it sounds reasonable.

This goes for most corporate discussion on HN where everyone talks with the authority of someone who deals with it daily. Unless you do have those insights, it's not all that interesting to regurgitate what we, the peanut gallery, suspect to be true.

kristintynski14• 4 years ago

I run a PR agency and in my experience, the bigger the brand, the more conservative they are. Many have dedicated brand teams who care only about how the brand is portrayed. Multiple independent departments would likely be weighing in on the issue. Unless Twitter was an enormously successful marketing channel for the business (it almost never is), why risk it?

mrtksn5• 4 years ago

So what's the risk here? What happens if someone sees an ad for Adidas above a tweet saying some bigoted stuff?

I can reason for Kanye being dropped by the brands after saying unhinged things, as they directly engage with him but in the context of web advertisement what is the mechanics of unrelated content damaging the brand?

kristintynski14• 4 years ago

Also, many larger companies advertise on Twitter simply to cover all their bases. If Twitter becomes an advertising pariah, higher ups are going to be asking the marketing team to justify staying. Given the mediocre ROI of Twitter ads in general, I think we will see many marketing heads err on the side of caution and recommend pausing until things get better.

skmurphy• 4 years ago

Catarina left this as a comment to the post:

I definitely hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.

fractallyte• 4 years ago

Thanks for posting this, I would have missed it! This addendum is even more important than the article.

wobbly_bush• 4 years ago

What does fee for service model look like? Charging every user?

bagels2• 4 years ago

It looks like a bankrupt Twitter, most likely.

maxfurman• 4 years ago

Pay to promote tweets, perhaps? Kind of like the situation for brands on Facebook now, where "organic" reach is strictly controlled to encourage paid promotion, but applied to all users?

It might work if Twitter didn't have a billion dollars in debt payments to make every year, on top of their fixed costs.

chucky123• 4 years ago

"For me, the best thing that has come from the Twitter dumpster fire is that I have been posting here instead. Let’s hope for a revival of the independent web, the platforms for which people pay, the Substacks and Word Presses and the like. The better internet we all deserve."

Totally agree. Would love for Twitter to be advertiser free. Will also put pressure on other social media apps.

jsnell• 4 years ago

This is just a second hand rehash of an anonymous and unverifiable comment on Blind. If there's a real adverising exodus, there must be better sources than that.

boplicity• 4 years ago

More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks, data shows

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter...

czbond• 4 years ago

That means little for the long term. What happens, is many companies do such things to "make a story of it" to appease some advertising base, and then quietly when no on is looking, or cares, in a few months companies quietly re-allocate budget back to such media channels.

ryantgtg2• 4 years ago

Incidentally, I’ve been seeing more ads than ever before on Twitter. There’s a promoted tweet every four tweets in my timeline. I’m pretty sure this is more than it was previously. It’s annoying!

hw• 4 years ago

Advertisers could just be pausing till the dust settles - which it eventually will. The faltering economy also is a good reason for advertisers to take this opportunity to revisit their ad spend. This could just be temporary, the next couple months will be telling. Until then it is premature to call advertising on Twitter dead

mortehu• 4 years ago

What is the distribution of this statistic in normal times? I don't know if a third is low or high.

marricks• 4 years ago

It’s anonymous as execs compared to Twitter who will never admit to these issues. It also tracks with what little I know about advertising.

Also… I think advertisers don’t want to be the spotlight, their job is to make their customers the spotlight. Publicly speaking out is likely a huge faux pas.

philliphaydon4• 4 years ago

I’ve noticed more ads lately than prior to Elon being involved.

I used to get ads for Apple and Nike mostly with the odd thing in between.

I haven’t seen a Nike ad all week , but apple is showing up and tons more ads in asia showing up.

So I’m convinced there’s more ads than usual.

esprehn• 4 years ago

Both those things can be true. If many of the top advertisers pulled their ads then they could be going out to the long tail and showing a larger number of lower value ads to compensate.

It's also possible you're in an A/B test to show a different ad volume.

In general sample size of 1 for ads (or feed ranking) is hard to reason about.

roganp• 4 years ago

Wow! 80M a year in ad spend for a midsized b2b company...

syspec• 4 years ago

Wouldn't this be 9M? 750K * 12?

postalrat• 4 years ago

The copied it from a comment they read and didn't bother doing the math.

cesarvarela3• 4 years ago

The attention economy seems to be "forcing" people to jump to conclusions as fast as possible to write that viral post "X is dead", "goodbye Y", etc.

You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.

It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.

bergenty3• 4 years ago

A lot of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. There are many people who don’t want the “new” twitter to succeed and being vocal about it will result in advertisers leaving the platform making the whole thing collapse in on itself.

Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.

AlchemistCamp6• 4 years ago

Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.

Wow. That’s a pretty mean-spirited way to go through life. Why not put your efforts into building something positive instead of trying to tear others down?

jmeister• 4 years ago

Upvoted for honesty.

nindalf2• 4 years ago

This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business. Even in its heyday, it had a fraction of the ad revenue of Meta. They were just showing users less relevant ads, meaning less value to advertisers and less revenue generated.

You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.

cloverich• 4 years ago

Its not zero sum because the user bases aren't the same. If twitter has eyeballs or time that facebook doesn't, they'll get advertisers.

davoneus• 4 years ago

I half suspect the only reason Twitter had the status it did is because all the news organizations pushed it so hard. Hell, it did all the hard work of finding interesting "new/hot" topics for them to cover. Made their job easier, and it's with the journalists I see a lot of concern and fear over where Twitter is heading.

Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.

s1artibartfast• 4 years ago

This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business.

Twitter had >5 billion in ad revenue. Facebook isnt the minimum threshold for good revenue.

It isn't a winner take all system. Meta might get the lions share, but that doesnt mean there is no room for competition.

Costs are adjusted to get similar ROI. Meta might get more clickthrough per add and command a higher price, but Twitter can compete with more adds for the same price, resulting in the same ROI.

HillRat• 4 years ago

As advertisers are saying, what Twitter really had going for it wasn't that it was a great place to advertise so much as it was a very engaged ad sales team that leveraged their agency and advertiser relations for all they were worth. Gutting ad sales (and mocking the concept of brand safety) is Musk -- whether he realizes it or not -- burning the advertising bridges behind him and forcing him to commit entirely to this idea of Twitter being a subscription-funded service. Now, Riedy's a long-timer who's held senior positions in both US and EMEA ad sales, so there's what normally would be considered a steady hand at the tiller, but not clear to me if he can keep the ship afloat under such a mercurial owner.

Aunche• 4 years ago

They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives.

The RoI will be better than alternatives if Twitter ads are cheap enough. TikTok and possibly YouTube aren't profitable either, but they have inherently higher expenses. If Facebook and Instagram can be profitable, that means that there's a profitable company inside Twitter somewhere. I'm skeptical that Elon can achieve this, but that doesn'tean it's impossible.

MarkMc• 4 years ago

When on vacation earlier this year I saw ads in a language I don't understand.

Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.

This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon

ProAm• 4 years ago

Twitter was always the 'commercial break' of the internet. Ad spots on TV and radio were 15-30 seconds. On twitter you got 140 (now 280 characters). Its always been advertising. Sizzle clips, strong sentences with no meat. Why would you pay for advertising on a website whose entire purpose is advertising. Maybe their ad targeting is not strong. The risk now is you're supporting someone promoting hate, violence, lies..... Maybe someone is still there that honestly likes twitter and doesnt like exposure. But its always been the internet's commercial break.

enkid2• 4 years ago

There are so many competitors for Twitter. Every social media platform is an alternative. Twitter's only moat is the network effect, and they are ruining any chance of that being maintained by making the experience awful, not moderating the platform and reinventing people who the majority of users don't want to hear from.

cesarvarela3• 4 years ago

Sorry but that's not true, no network provides the same experience and dopamine flavor:

- twitch: parasocial/games - youtube: long videos/reviews - tiktok: short videos/random stuff/zoomers - facebook: friends/stalking/boomers ...

- twiter: microbloging/townhall/news

Totally different use cases with each having a clearly defined space (of course there is some overlap, it is all about human interaction after all).

mlindner4• 4 years ago

At least for me personally there aren't any real alternatives.

* Facebook/Meta: I'm a life long non-facebook user and never will use any facebook product.

* Reddit: I'm on Reddit and have been for a long time but moderators ban people on a whim constantly for the slightest disagreement. My primary account has been banned from several major subreddits for a long time. Any community that grows to any size becomes a cess pool. It also doesn't work for news, as news is delayed by up to a day before getting any kind of traction.

* Mastodon: Becoming a left wing echo chamber that mixes the worst parts of Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter.

* Truth Social: Don't get me started...

* Forums: I still use a number of site-dedicated forums.

indecisive_user• 4 years ago

Agree with the sibling comment.

Snapchat, TikTok, Hacker News, and LinkedIn are all social media sites. In the sense that you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, sure, these are competitors to Twitter.

But as far as actual content, value, or user experience, none of these are direct competitors. How exactly would the White House or your local school district go about making an announcement on TikTok?

dangus4• 4 years ago

The article doesn’t jump to conclusions.

As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.

They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.

Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.

No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…

On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.

Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.

You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.

cesarvarela3• 4 years ago

I mentioned in another reply, but none of the networks you enumerate have the same value proposition as Twitter.

For example today, I'm watching the World Cup.. Argentina just conceded a goal... I want to see reactions, memes, etc. Too soon for Youtube, uploading videos takes time, TikTok is too random.. Too soon for Tumblr and Pinterest.. Snap format is weird.. Reddit also might have something but I want a shorter format, reactions from known celebrities and sport commentators.. Instagram has some stuff but it is too picture centered... and then comes Twitter, exactly what I wanted, a quick fix of the now, some funny replies, I scroll a little bit, I go back to watching the match.

In the real world people are using Twitter the same as they were before Musk, and if the this trend doesn't change or even improves, advertisers will come back.

If there are eyeballs there are ads. It's a fact of nature (sadly).

Please tell me something that millions of people pay attention to daily that isn't plagued with ads.

vilda• 4 years ago

I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.

The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

Bingo. The problem is every modern recession seems to be topped by an LBO, and Twitter is this season’s RJR-Nabisco / Harrah’s.

threeseed6• 4 years ago

As that financial advertiser said the problem with Twitter is that the performance and ROI of their campaigns has plummeted. That has nothing to do with recession and it's nothing like Youtube/Facebook which had external and temporary factors.

It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.

brightball2• 4 years ago

Does it though? The ad engine was either in place already or it wasn’t. There shouldn’t be a shift in performance of the engine due to people being let go.

edmundsauto2• 4 years ago

I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.

One thing we will find out - did they return on their own, or did they return because of persistent sales calls from FB and YT? Those are the part of the cuts - Twitter lost some very high profile relationships with brands that spend big. And it's reach/scale rarely justified dedicated campaigns - I'm sure most agencies are happy to not spend 20% of their time on 5% of their reach, compared to G and Meta.

notatoad• 4 years ago

the most recent advertiser exodus from youtube was mostly stemmed because youtube put in significant work to increase their content moderation and improve brand safety - that was when all your favourite edgy youtubers started complaining about having their videos demonetized.

dorkwood• 4 years ago

The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.

Is this true? I've seen a lot of big budget ad investment from companies whose stocks have been tanking all year. It almost seems like they're trying to dig themselves out of a hole with marketing.

luxuryballs• 4 years ago

So basically these companies are proving allegiance to a single political agenda. If you don’t censor those who are critical of people in power, (but only on behalf our specific friends who are in power) then we pull your funding. This has got to be the most unsettling thing I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.

IntelMiner• 4 years ago

Companies only have one political allegiance. The almighty dollar

Turns out people don't really want a Big Mac when it's sandwiched (ha ha) between Nazis and Crypto spam

mjmsmith3• 4 years ago

You should read about what happened to the Dixie Chicks in 2003. It'll blow your mind.

dralley• 4 years ago

I still remember when conservatives, including most of the talent on Fox News were going after companies like Starbucks for the crime of, gasp, using "Happy Holidays" decorations and slogans instead of "Merry Chrismas" ones.

rayiner• 4 years ago

Man. If you had told teenage me that on the 2022 equivalent of slashdot, tech folks would attack a communications platform for offending the sensibilities of Fortune 500 advertisers, I wouldn’t have believed you.

root_axis4• 4 years ago

The advertisers will return eventually. I'm anti-elon and anti-twitter, but as much as I would love to indulge in the schadenfreude, the collapse of twitter seems totally unrealistic.

coolbreezetft223• 4 years ago

Yeah, seems most likely it will continue to run but won't make much revenue and changes will be harder.

It's not like HN or sites like 4Chan require a lot to keep running but if Elon is hoping to get some return on his $44billion then that now seems very unrealistic (which based on his desperate and now-defunct 8$/month subscription scheme I assume he is)

ss20033• 4 years ago

Exactly. Yahoo is still here, is it a force like the 2001 Yahoo?

snowwrestler4• 4 years ago

I’m not sure they will, and I’m not sure Elon wants them to—an idea the blog post discusses at some length.

root_axis4• 4 years ago

Why wouldn't Elon want advertisers to return? I don't see that suggestion discussed anywhere in the article.

With the exception of the ideological concerns, all the problems described in the article can be eventually solved with restaffing.

yackback• 4 years ago

Twitter will survive, and several other large technology companies will suddenly realize they only need about half the people they have to make money.

anonu• 4 years ago

I don't buy it. Ok, I'm not a veteran ad spender, but the claim that after two weeks on Elon-Twitter the metrics shifted so drastically that it wasn't worth it doesn't make sense to me. If anything there's more eyeballs on Twitter than before.

rconti• 4 years ago

I haven't seen an ad on Twitter in quite awhile, because I read single tweets linked to from somewhere else. I don't have an account, I don't have the mobile app, and I don't browse a feed.

dreadlordbone• 4 years ago

It feels like it's someone trying to manifest a reality.

hexis• 4 years ago

This post seems to suggest that the demand for Elon-Twitter failure continues to outstrip supply.

boringg• 4 years ago

Elon has managed to lower everyones expectations on outcomes that if Twitter is still up next year and not bankrupt he will still have credibility.

I think this thing is going to turn around in 3 months if it makes through these rocky waters. Whether the product is the same and we like it TBD

627467• 4 years ago

I don't know how this ongoing "Twitter revolution" is going to turn out (out of pessimism, I bet the likelyhood of success is 3:7) but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads) - NOT because there's anything inherently bad with ad money (there is!) - but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.

I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical/unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.

PuppyTailWags• 4 years ago

I don't think most ads are critical to specific platforms, especially if those platforms take a sudden turn of ownership. I'm sure if Facebook got bought out, somehow, and the new ownership started telling all of their ad clients that they have literally no plan for them, they would also leave in droves. [My understanding is that this is what Musk effectively did during an end-of-year reestablishment of annual advertising contracts, thereby Twitter got a lot of clients leaving the platform.]

kristintynski14• 4 years ago

Watch him turn it into an OnlyFans clone... seems like the only viable subscription model to earn enough to stay afloat, porn. If he implemented AI Porn features, could earn more. With patrion/substack style subscription features for the non-porn content too, maybe it works?

ihuman• 4 years ago

Twitter already made that. They launched Subscriptions (previously Super Follows) a year ago.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/subscriptions

scythe• 4 years ago

Twitter would need a lot of subscriptions to justify a $44B valuation on user revenue alone. You'd need 16 million subscribers paying $8/mo each just to cover operating expenses. Maybe Elon can bring opex down (firing everyone is a start, I guess?); maybe it is just a vanity purchase after all, but there is a reason that the advertising model is so dominant in social media, and so hard to avoid. Reddit has done everything it can to grow direct user revenue for years now and it's still basically an ad company.

tbrownaw3• 4 years ago

but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.

Maybe they really are going to stay off Twitter in particular.

Maybe leaving will noticeably hurt sales and they'll quietly come back in a month or two once the noise has died down.

Maybe they'll notice no impact to sales and experiment with pulling back from other social sites as well (lol I wish).

thwayunion4• 4 years ago

Maybe they'll notice no impact to sales and experiment with pulling back from other social sites as well (lol I wish).

I think this is the most likely outcome. I'm not using socials anymore. Alphabet still gets my money hand over fist though :(

brightball2• 4 years ago

If there are eyeballs, there will be ads. Right now, he cares about keeping the eyeballs and he's definitely doing that.

I barely used Twitter over the past 10ish years and I'm spending more time on it than ever right now.

nebula88043• 4 years ago

Those people are just one news cycle away from not caring anymore.

sebastialonso• 4 years ago

True but reality is more nuanced than that. Case in point, Truth Social also "has eyeballs" but is there any respectable company investing in ads there?

For better or worse, the type of eyeballs also matter, increasingly so I'd say.

anonymousab• 4 years ago

advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.

They were not sticky to Twitter, the platform, alone. But to Twitter, the platform, coupled with Twitter, the organization, and the high engagement of its relevant ad, sales and advertiser relationship teams.

Which is where Musk went wrong, because that was part of the company that he needlessly drove out. The exact opposite of bloat! At least until an equivalent revenue stream was secured.

tptacek• 4 years ago

Believing that Twitter's ad revenue is unsustainable is a reason to short Twitter, not a reason to pay a huge premium to acquire it.

edanm• 4 years ago

Well to be fair, if you think you can give Twitter a better revenue source that eventually captures more value for Twitter, you can think a long play makes sense here.

FranzFerdiNaN5• 4 years ago

but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads)

You dont do this by first discarding all your existing revenue sources.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Just remember we are all dead in 100 years.

memish2• 4 years ago

"A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition.

They broke the deal." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000

The condition he's referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?

jhp123• 4 years ago

if unnamed "activist groups" are trying to kill twitter advertising then there should be a paper trail of ... activism, no?

Robotbeat7• 4 years ago

I noticed that. There was an announcement of a council, people from certain specific organizations were part of it, then a day later I noticed those same organizations had joined on to pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter. Seemed weird and a bit disheartening, seeing that I was hoping for the various parties to come to some sort of mutually beneficial understanding.

dagmx• 4 years ago

This sounds like Illuminati conspiracy from Musk. Who is this “coalition”, and why would they be making deals on whether or not to attack his platform?

Also if they were actually activist, why would they be satisfied with just a moderation council? Surely if they cared about causes enough to agree to not criticize Twitter, they would criticize it for other things that would pop up?

This sounds like Elon didn’t bother setting up a council (there was never proof he tried) and is looking to spin the story now that advertisers are dropping off.

Remember that key advertisers dropped off before he even announced the idea of a council. They even specifically mentioned that his erratic behaviour was part of the reason.

I think Elon is going for the classic “victimhood” play to garner sympathy.

lawn• 4 years ago

Moderation council? As he showed pretty clearly by unbanning Trump and others, its only member is Musk himself.

psadri• 4 years ago

Tesla doesn’t spend money on advertising. It might be time to change that?

ncko• 4 years ago

People speak as if twitter isn't going to hire more employees. Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term. They have to realize this and they'll probably start hiring as needed.

nomel2• 4 years ago

Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term

How is this obvious? If you’ve ever been involved with someone leaving a team, you’ll understand there’s usually some chaos right after, as everyone catches up on absorbing some new responsibilities.

Now this, but spread throughout the company.

I think it’s too early to say that those who stayed are incapable of taking up the slack. Give them some time ffs. It’s only been two week.

4v0v• 4 years ago

I'm really interested in how this will turn out. If he manage to improve Twitter after so many laid off I'll never take any big tech employee seriously ever again.

28304283409234• 4 years ago

Software services are like puppies. Leave the house and everything is fine. For a while.

The Twitter Advertiser Exodus

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